Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Quest
Here at Shmoop, we usually analyze a novel (or a single short story) in terms of its complication and then resolution. The characters go on some kind of journey, they progress, crisis comes, we all learn an important lesson of some kind, and that's the end of it. But because The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a short story collection, we can't really apply that formula. After all, Conan Doyle expressly designed these stories to be self-contained. So there's not much development across stories within the Adventures (though there might be, arguably, across the trajectory of the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories). See our detailed summaries for a precise description of the plot; for more analysis, check out our thoughts on "Characters" and "Themes."