Am dining at Goldinis Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver S. H.

The game's afoot for the most famous amateur detective of all time in this collection of eight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales.

The Speckled Band, a Victorian melodrama in a country house, comes complete with murderous villain, murdered heroine, and a very unpleasant snake; Silver Blaze tells of a missing race horse on Dartmoor which turns out not to be missing at all, and a murder that never was. In The Redheaded League a pawnbroker answers an advertisement for a red-headed man and bizarrely finds himself copying out the Encyclopedia Britannica; in The Bruce Partington Plans Holmes is skulking in the London Underground with a dead body when his patriotic services are called upon to find some stolen state secrets in the run-up to World War I.

Sidney Paget was the original illustrator and helped to form the image of Sherlock Holmes which exists to this day - in fact, it was he who created the famous deer-stalker!