How long does it take to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle is about 104,000 words long, so it takes about 6 hours 41 minutes to read at the average adult reading speed for fiction (260 words a minute). On Scrolls it is 3,320 short chunks across 12 stories; at 10 minutes a day you would finish it in 41 days.

104,351words
6 h 41 minreading time
3,320chunks on Scrolls
~7 sper chunk

Updated 31 October 2026. Counted from the Scrolls edition.

How many days will it take to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?

It depends on how many minutes a day you read. At 260 words a minute:

Reading a dayDays to finish
5 minutes81 days
10 minutes41 days
15 minutes27 days
20 minutes21 days
30 minutes14 days

About The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 collection of twelve Sherlock Holmes stories, narrated by Dr Watson, including A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League and The Speckled Band.

It opens:

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

Stories and reading times

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes has 12 stories. The longest takes about 38 minutes; the shortest about 27 minutes.

#StoryWordsTimeChunks
1A Scandal in Bohemia8,51833 min281
2The Red-Headed League9,10635 min280
3A Case of Identity6,97527 min220
4The Boscombe Valley Mystery9,61637 min310
5The Five Orange Pips7,31428 min228
6The Man with the Twisted Lip9,20035 min280
7The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle7,80930 min244
8The Adventure of the Speckled Band9,80538 min315
9The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb8,28332 min268
10The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor8,10231 min240
11The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet9,67937 min326
12The Adventure of the Copper Beeches9,94438 min328

How to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on Scrolls

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is free to read on Scrolls, the whole book. Scrolls shows it one short chunk per screen: swipe up for the next, the way you move through a feed, and your place syncs across devices.

How we worked this out

We counted the words in the edition you read on Scrolls, then divided by 260 words a minute, the average adult silent reading rate for English fiction in a review of 190 studies: Brysbaert (2019), “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, Journal of Memory and Language 109. Fast readers will take less time and careful readers more; a Scrolls chunk averages about 7 seconds at that speed.

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