IIn my reading life, I have never been far away from Sherlock Holmes. I often and routinely re-read Dr. Watson’s wonderful accounts of the Great Detective’s cases.

My habit over the decades has been to regularly return to Dr. Watson’s narratives, so lovingly collected by the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The world owes an enormous debt to Doyle for working with John Watson to preserve the many cases that we have.

It is particularly the short stories that I find myself most often returning to. Having decided, yet again, to start another rereading, I began with one of my favorite cases, “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Dr. Watson introduces us to probably the most interesting character in all of Holmes’s recorded casebook: Irene Adler.

To say much about the plot of any mystery short story (especially a Sherlock Holmes mystery) is to risk giving too much away. A Sherlock Holmes story is, of course, something to be savored and lived through. And for someone like me, who has reread them countless times, it remains a moment of pleasure I would never want to compromise.

So instead of a plot tease, I will include Dr. Watson’s own words from the opening paragraph. I know for certain that no one who loves Literature and Mysteries will be able to resist wanting to read (or re-read yet again) “A Scandal in Bohemia” after reading this.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.