I finished this several days ago, but have been on the road all week. It struck me that a lot of the stories in this collection were a bit longer, allowing Doyle to work through his ideas in a slightly more thorough way without resorting to the padding which fills up space in three of the four novels. This collection includes “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, which so memorably features an Underground train, and (in my edition) “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”, in which the said box, containing two gruesome objects packed in salt, is sent by post to London from, of all places, Belfast (where I am at this very moment boarding a plane). Unfortunately the title story, in which Holmes penetrates a German spy-ring by going into deep cover as an Irish revolutionary, is a tad silly, but the rest are all good.