Arthur Conan Doyle

This selection of 12 of the best Sherlock Holmes stories is designed to give a full sense of their world, taking Holmes's career from its early days to its close. It includes the book-length 'The Sign of the Four' and notes by Barry McCrea that give a sense of the different currents running beneath the stories' surface.

Sherlock Holmes is a great detective. There are few cases that he cannot solve. In these three stories we meet a young woman who is terrified of a mysterious speckled band, a family who think that five orange pips are a sign of death, and a banker who believes that his son is a thief. But are things really as they seem?

In 1891, the great detective, Sherlock Holmes, disappeared in Switzerland while working on a dangerous case. Everyone thought he was dead, but three years later he returned to England. Holmes and his friend, Dr Watson, had many more adventures together. Three of his most interesting cases feature in this book.

'A Study in Scarlet' is where we meet Holmes for the first time. Dr Watson relates how he met Holmes in the course of an impossible crime investigation which baffled the police.

Clive Merrison and Michael Williams star as Holmes and Watson in this collection of of twelve stories from the unique fully dramatised BBC Radio 4 canon, based on Arthur Conan Doyle's original short stories.