The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes of the Speckled Band" as his overall favourite. Arthur Conan Doyle began writing while studying medicine at university in the late 1870s, and had his first short story, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", published in September 1879. After eight years, "A Study in Scarlet", Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story, was published by Ward Lock & Co. The novel was well received, but Doyle was paid little for it, and despite a sequel novel, "The Sign of the Four", which was published in Lipincott's Monthly Magazine, he shifted his focus to short stories. In early 1891, the first editor of "The
Canon of Sherlock Holmes Jack Tracy; "The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", edited by Peter Haining; "The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes", edited by Richard Lancelyn Green; and the final volume of Leslie S. Klinger's "Sherlock Holmes Reference Library" titled "The Apocrypha of Sherlock Holmes". These works, each with slightly different contents, discussed several titles and their place in the canon. In addition to the canon, Conan Doyle wrote (occasionally with a co-writer) a number of vignettes, play adaptations and essays involving Holmes, and two short stories in which Holmes makes a possible cameo appearance. Most were published in various places during his lifetime; another has