A perennial favourite, and the source of the celebrated line about the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (already famous well before Mark Haddon’s forgettable novel). It’s a story that has been adapted several times for television for good reason, as it’s one of the most dramatic of the Holmes stories. And for pure mystery buffs the clues are nicely selected and presented. Everything came together nicely for Doyle here.

As so often I did have questions about Holmes’s method. “It is one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence,” he tells Watson before they get started. I think I know what he’s talking about, but by the time they get to the scene of the crime he’s back crawling on his hands and knees over the moor, looking for discarded matches and footprints. That seems like acquiring fresh evidence to me. And can we say Holmes is just a “reasoner” at work here, sifting the details? On two separate occasions he draws attention to “the value of imagination” in solving the case. What this means is cutting free from facts and evidence entirely and coming up with theories and suppositions that can later be tested. That seems like a good way to proceed to me, but it doesn’t square with what Holmes says in other places about his method. Though if you’re a genius you don’t have to follow the rules anyway.

Holmes index