The Essays include: Good Old Index!; Some Times the Old Ways are Best; A Fertile Field; Sherlock Holmes and the Misprision of Felony; The Blue Enigma; Barred-Tailed Geese; The Hoof-Marks in the Priory School; Was It Baxter?; Was It Attempted Murder?; The Singular Case of Fletcher Robinson; Hallamshire Revisited; Chess and Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes Was No Burglar; Fingerprints and Sherlock Holmes; In Defense of Joseph Bell; Those Five Volumes; Identifying the Diogenes Club: An Armchair Exercise; Two Canonical Problems Solved; If We Have to be Whimsical; Silver Blaze: The Master Vindicated; An Assessment of the Ten Best Canonical Stories; Death in the Stalls; Sherlockian Double-Crostic; A Counterfeit of the Sage of Baker Street.

Magistrate, and later Judge, Sherburne Tupper Bigelow is an invaluable landmark in Sherlockian scholarship. His knowledge of horses, hoofmarks, hounds, Hallamshire, Holmes and the Law is unexcelled - and fortunately he committed his peppery opinions paper, much as he often offenders before his bench to prison with peppery opinions.