Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs. Doyle

Sherlock Holmes is back from the dead! After mounting pressure from fans across the world, Arthur Conan Doyle finally revives the great, fictional detective in a new story published in The Strand Magazine. Visiting the Reichenbach Falls, the site of Sherlock's "death," Lucy Worsley explains how Holmes survived his brawl with Professor Moriarty.

There's a lot of weirdness in the later Sherlock Holmes stories – the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. There are vampires, even a bit of science fiction. To Sherlock Holmes fans who liked Holmes’s rationality, this must have seemed like a really strange new departure? Lucy explores the story ‘The Creeping Man’ with Professor Janice Allan.

So how did the first story in the new collection – 1903’s The Empty House – measure up? It weaves together Sherlock’s return, with a classic murder mystery. Lucy re-stages the crime with Jonathan Ferguson, the keeper of firearms at the Royal Armouries. Does Arthur’s science stand up to scrutiny?

Dressed in military attire, Arthur heads to the front line during the first world war. Much to Arthur's disappointment, he was visiting as the author of Sherlock Holmes, not as a soldier fighting for his country. After meeting and greeting the troops at the trenches, Arthur turns his attention to devising a new Sherlock Holmes story – a spy novel set just before the war titled "His Last Bow."

The public had wanted Arthur to channel his inner Sherlock for years. In 1908, he received another letter from a fan, who’d read The Hound of the Baskervilles while in prison. His name was George Edalji. George believed he’d been wrongly accused of a crime and thought Arthur Conan Doyle was the man to help.

Arthur thought he had the makings of a great ghost story. There was this phantom hound, and there was the spooky setting of Dartmoor. It is of course Hound of the Baskervilles. At the heart of this gothic tale there was a mystery to be solved, and one man would be perfect for the job. But Arthur had spent the last 8 years trying to make a name for himself away from Sherlock Holmes.

If Sherlock Holmes had been about brains, this was about brawn. Arthur
became the judge of Britain’s very first body building competition at the Albert Hall. Can you image 80 men standing on pedestals, wearing leopard skin? But what was the aim of it?

With the Boer War looming, Arthur vows to leave Sherlock behind for good and applies to the war office to fight for his country instead. Both Doyle and Holmes' futures are uncertain, but is this Arthur's chance to finally become the hero of his own story?

How do you kill the world's most famous detective? Lucy Worsley visits the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, the site where Arthur Conan Doyle finally decided to have his fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, killed following a dramatic confrontation with prolific criminal, Professor Moriarty.

Sherlock Holmes solved some of his most challenging cases through his careful observation and masterful skills of deduction. However, would this fictional detective's methods hold up in the non-fictional world? Lucy Worsley and Professor Sue Black discuss how some aspects of Sherlock's investigative tactics are still being used to solve crimes today.

Arthur's head and heart are in conflict with one another. On one hand, Arthur believes Sherlock is preventing him from being taken seriously as a writer, but – on the other – the detective has made Arthur rich beyond his wildest dreams. Lucy, alongside Arthur's step great-grandson, Richard Pooley, inspect the letters the author wrote to his Mam in hopes of revealing more about his inner turmoil.

Sherlock Holmes is the most well-known detective in the world. He made his author, Arthur Conan Doyle, rich and famous. But the writer came to hate his fictional character. Through the changing world of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Lucy Worsley explores why.