Arthur Conan Doyle published The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, collecting eleven stories. The volume contains some of the most significant stories in the canon: "The Musgrave Ritual," an earlier Holmes case narrated in flashback that provides the earliest direct account of Holmes before he met Watson; "The Greek Interpreter," which introduces Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's elder brother who possesses the same extraordinary observational powers but lacks the energy to apply them practically; and "The Final Problem," in which Holmes and Professor Moriarty, who appears only in this story, go over the Reichenbach Falls together, apparently killing both. Doyle intended this to be permanent.
Doyle was tired of Holmes by 1893 , the character was dominating his output and preventing him from writing the historical novels he considered his serious work. "The Final Problem" was designed as a final disposal, and the outcry at Holmes's death, letters of protest, readers wearing mourning bands, revealed how completely the character had escaped Doyle's control over his own creation. Moriarty, constructed in a single story as Holmes's intellectual equal and moral inverse, was undercharacterized in the canon relative to his cultural influence; the Napoleon of Crime whom every subsequent adaptation has elaborated is largely a projection onto Doyle's brief sketch.
The Memoirs is stronger than the Adventures at its best and slightly more uneven across the full collection. "The Musgrave Ritual" is the most formally interesting, the nested narrative structure, with Holmes telling Watson about a case before Watson knew him, complicates the usual Watson-as-narrator arrangement and gives Holmes's voice without Watson's mediation. "Silver Blaze," the horse-racing story whose solution depends on the significance of the dog that did nothing in the night, is the most formally elegant case in the Doyle canon: the solution is prepared so precisely that it seems obvious in retrospect, which is exactly what a good mystery should achieve.
Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 mysterious days in 1926 , the real reason was never fully explained.
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