Shadows and Sleuths

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.

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."

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.

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?