Complete and unabridged, with 29 full-page plates by Marianne North, Frederic Shields and Walter Greaves. The last twelve stories, written when Doyle wanted nothing to do with them: a soldier who will not show his face, a woman who cannot show hers, a creeping professor, a vampire in Sussex. Doyle put his name to them reluctantly and hedged the collection with a preface asking readers to let Holmes go. The strangeness is the point — these are the cases of an old man's imagination. Twenty-nine landscape plates by painters including Marianne North and Edward Atkinson Hornel carry the reader from Jamaican valleys to Northumberland fairs, a fitting backdrop for Holmes's last travels.
