Eighty-three short stories.

"To provide a little guidance through this massive tome, I've divided the stories into several categories but admit, immediately, it is of questionable validity, as many of the stories fall into more than one subdivision (A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse, for example, will be found in the "Literary Writers" section but, since they wrote parodies, they could be found there just as easily). It's not unlike making lists of foods that are delicious and foods that are fattening: there will be overlapping. The two most reasonable choices are to ignore the categorizations altogether or to suggest that you don't take them very much to heart and just enjoy the stories"--Contents, page vii.

"Collects eighty-three stories ... published over a span of a hundred years. Featuring ... cases from [the master himself, Arthur Conan Doyle], Leslie S. Klinger, Laurie R. King, Lyndsay Faye, and Daniel Stashower; pastiches from ... classic (P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy B. Hughes, Kingsley Amis), and current (Anne Perry, Stephen King, [Neil Gaiman], Colin Dexter); parodies from Doyle's contemporaries (A.A. Milne, James M. Barrie, O. Henry); genre-bending cases by science-fiction greats Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock"--,Back cover.