"I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm-chair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it." Dr. Watson, The Musgrave Ritual, p.1.
Sherlock Holmes: classic stories contains nine short stories and one crime novel which Arthur Conan Doyle himself considered to be the best adventures of the most famous fictional detective in an article published in The Strand Magazine in 1927. The nine short stories present in this collection of classic stories include the following:
The Musgrave Ritual (1893)
The Speckled Band (1892)
The Five Orange Pips (1891)
The Reigate Squire (1893)
A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)
The Red-Headed League (1891)
The Final Problem (1893)
The Empty House (1903)
The Devil's Foot (1910)
As for the tenth story, it is none other than The Hound of the Baskervilles, published in 1902, one of the best-known of Arthur Conan Doyle's crime novels, and which might also be the only tale out of the sixty Sherlock Holmes adventures that oscillates between the detective and supernatural genre.
Like most people, I was familiar with the universe of Sherlock Holmes and its characters: Dr. John Watson, Inspector G. Lestrade, and Professor James Moriarty as well as Irene Adler; either by watching Guy Ritchie's film adaptations or by watching Steven Moffat's BBC series adaptation. However, I wasn't familiar at all with Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories and writing style. That's why I believe that Sherlock Holmes: classic stories is a good place to start for whoever has never read any Sherlockian detective tales before. But I do think that the short-stories should have been placed in chronological order so as to prevent clumsy transition from one story to the next.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: classic stories, New York, Sterling Publishing, Barnes & Nobles, 2019.