This paper argues that although memory serves as the privileged method through which the‘truth’ is ostensibly accessed in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, it is inextricablypaired with an unlikely and subversive partner in crime: adventure.The major mode ofretrospection is thus unsettled by the minor yet insistent mode of advent, and “the truth”seemingly attained at the conclusion of every story is very much rephrased as an arbitraryperformance. Memory saturates Doyle’s narratives: it is hypermnesic Holmes’ routine andstrategy, and the foundation of his success; it is also Watson’s favoured technique, shapinghis retrospective case-records;and it governs the reader’s reception,as validation andpleasure derive from the reader’s remembrance of past cases. But Doyle gives memory thejolt of adventure, and in the process, he develops an oxymoronic literary agenda that alignshim with the preoccupations of his contemporaries, notably Robert Louis Stevenson.