The stories when translated to film have the advantage of sets and costuming appropriate to their period, of action and of dramatic acting, but they leave little to the viewers’ imagination and deny him or her the pleasure of a close study on the printed page of Holmes’s deductive methods. To derive the maximum satisfaction from his writing, Doyle’s fiction needs to be read.

He began the Holmes stories in 1887 and in the ensuing decades – his detective was said to have been in active practice for twenty-three years – wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories. His was not the first detective fiction. It was preceded long before by William Godwin’s Adventures of Caleb Williams, by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and by Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, but his protagonist was the first detective to be presented as personality, hero and star. While his other work is entertaining and, in the case of The Lost World, original, the Sherlock Holmes stories constitute a landmark in English literature. Holmes was not only a celebrity in his author’s lifetime and far beyond but the forerunner of a thousand fictional detectives investigating crime and pursuing criminals all over the world.

I have described Holmes as protagonist and hero, yet he is the narrator of his own exploits in only two stories, The Musgrave Ritual and The ‘Gloria Scott’, while two others are told in the third person. It is the job of Dr Watson, his colleague and himself the precursor of many a detective’s sidekick, to chronicle his investigations and successes. Somewhat sycophantic but often also acerbic in a practical way, Watson has recorded the adventures too dramatically for Holmes’s taste. He complains that his biographer has placed too much emphasis on the sensational aspects of the cases and neglected to describe the detective’s deductive methods. Readers do not agree. For their success the stories rely on the creation of atmosphere – terrifying, sinister or mystifying – and on the eccentricities and curious charm of Holmes, while the methods can be amusing but look a little amateurish in the light of modern forensics.

Doyle’s own favourites among them included The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Red-headed League, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Musgrave Ritual but not my own favourite, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. My preference, I think, is due to its quasi-political content, to the horror engendered in anyone who has mislaid valuable and irreplaceable documents and the vital part played in the story by the London Underground. The arrangement with the train would have worked in the 1890s and possibly could be made to work now, a hundred years later. The Musgrave Ritual concerns what its title suggests and has about it an air of mystery and suggestion of the occult as well as introducing the reader to Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, an intellectual giant superior in brain power (according to Holmes himself) to his own.

We are told that the snake and bell-pull contrivance in The Adventure of the Speckled Band will not stand up to testing but does anyone now really care? It is a marvellous story and even today takes one aback that any would-be killer could think up so diabolical a murder method. But ‘it’s a wicked world,’ as Holmes remarks, ‘and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all.’

The fiction concerning royal or aristocratic personages holds less appeal for me than does that which explores the lives of working people or the middle classes. A Scandal in Bohemia is the exception, largely due to the presence of Irene Adler. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, Irene is a name which first appeared in England in about 1880 and would therefore have been fashionable and perhaps glamorous when Doyle began writing about Holmes in 1887. The story is not one of his best but Irene Adler, opera singer, beauty, adventuress, blackmailer, has the distinction of being the only woman – perhaps the only person – to outwit him. To him, as Watson says, ‘she is always the woman.’ But he hastens to add that, ‘It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love.’ He never does. While Watson marries and appears to have married twice – though this may be a mistake on Doyle’s part – Holmes remains single and celibate.

A Scandal in Bohemia is also the story in which Holmes manages, in his subtle and ironic way, to be rude to a king. He is no respecter of persons. In The Adventure of the Priory School he tells a duke – and these are the days when a duke could be a cabinet minister – that he has condoned a felony and aided the escape of a murderer. And when a ‘noble bachelor’ in a story with that title tells him condescendingly that he presumes the detective’s usual clients are not from his level of society, Holmes replies that this is so, his last client was the King of Scandinavia.

Doyle understood that his readers would wish to identify with his characters, as all readers do, in any age. The Victorians also had that passion for celebrity which is so common today but instead of pop singers and models, their celebrities belonged in a wealthy and landowning upper class. So while he could people many of his stories with characters like the unfortunate engineer who loses his thumb and that master of disguise, the man with the twisted lip – two of the best stories, these – he understood that to attract readers he must also write about a jewelled coronet which is ‘one of the most precious public possessions of the empire’ and the fabulous blue carbuncle, abstracted from the jewel case of a countess. Twice he is mentioned as having a king for a client, while titled men and women abound in his fiction. Not only is he paid for his services but is awarded the Legion of Honour in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez. The Dutch royal family presents him with a fabulous ring and he receives an emerald tie-pin from Queen Victoria herself.

Probably the best-known of all the collection is the long short story The Hound of the Baskervilles. Much of its popularity it owes to its bleak and sinister setting and to the supernatural element, so effectively dismissed by Holmes when he solves the mystery. It is a story of wonderful originality and when it first appeared must have had a spine-chilling effect on readers.