Sherlock Holmes

A young doctor with a brilliant degree and no money is offered an arrangement too generous to refuse: a fine house in Brook Street, a practice fully furnished, and a silent partner who asks only for a share of the takings and a room of his own.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

43 min·No. 216

London, November 1898. A black-edged note arrives at Baker Street before breakfast: "My brother has been found dead. Last night I heard him playing in a locked and empty room.

1 hr 31 min·No. 203

The most famous racehorse in England has vanished, and his trainer lies dead on the moor. Days before the Wessex Cup, Silver Blaze, the favourite, disappears from his stable at King's Pyland on Dartmoor.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

57 min·No. 194

For three hundred years an old English family has recited the same strange riddle, word for word, father to son — a catechism of questions and answers that no Musgrave has ever thought to question.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

50 min·No. 189

A governess named Violet Hunter comes to Baker Street with an offer she cannot understand. A wealthy, jovial gentleman wishes to hire her at an extravagant salary — but on the strangest of conditions.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

1 hr 5 min·No. 187

Sent to fetch a friend from a riverside opium den, Dr. Watson stumbles instead upon Sherlock Holmes himself — in disguise, and deep in one of the strangest cases of his career. A respectable gentleman named Neville St.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

1 hr 1 min·No. 180

"It was the band!

by Arthur Conan Doyle

1 hr 2 min·No. 172

A pawnbroker with flaming red hair answers a newspaper advertisement and finds himself hired by the mysterious Red-Headed League, paid four pounds a week to copy out the encyclopaedia under one absurd condition — that he never leave the office during working hours — until one morning a card on the door announces the League dissolved and no such society ever known to exist; when Jabez Wilson brings his ridiculous tale to 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes sees what his bewildered client cannot: behind the farce lies one of the most cunning crimes he has ever been asked to prevent, and the answer has been hiding beneath everyone's feet the whole time; ranked by Conan Doyle himself among his finest Holmes stories and a perfect showcase of the detective's method, where the most laughable clue conceals the most serious danger, first printed in The Strand Magazine in August 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

1 hr·No. 161

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman — when a masked stranger calls at 221B Baker Street after dark claiming to be the agent of a European royal house, Holmes sees through the disguise before the man finishes his first sentence: the King of Bohemia is about to marry, and a single photograph in the hands of Irene Adler, an opera singer with a brain of the first order and the face of the most beautiful of women, could shatter the engagement and shake a throne; armed with disguises, a smoke rocket, and the cold certainty that no one has ever beaten him, Holmes sets out to recover the photograph — and meets the only adversary who ever saw through him in return; this is the very first Sherlock Holmes short story ever published, the case that made Doyle's detective the most famous in the world and the only case Holmes lost, first printed in The Strand Magazine in July 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.

by Arthur Conan Doyle

58 min·No. 159

London, 1891: a young woman arrives at Baker Street carrying a chess piece her father tried to burn — a red pawn carved from Indian ivory and stained the colour of old blood — and every Tuesday for seven weeks another piece has arrived by post with no letter and no demand, just the slow deliberate assembly of a game Colonel Sir Alistair Morven cannot bear to finish; as Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

1 hr 24 min·No. 147

Yorkshire coast, November: a baronet is found dead in his locked study with salt water pooled near the hearth, seaweed pressed beneath the bolted door, and no earthly way in or out — for three consecutive nights before his death a bell tolled from beneath the sea, the drowned monks of Dunmere Abbey ringing judgment upon the house above the cliffs — and when Sherlock Holmes arrives he finds a replaced bell-pull with a new cord married to an old tassel, pale cave sand in a locked drawer, candle wax beneath the desk, the name of a long-wrecked ship no one will speak aloud, and a housekeeper whose thirty-two years of spotless loyalty may have been thirty-two years of waiting; entirely fictional in homage to classic detective fiction, The Bells of Dunmere Abbey is a locked-room mystery about guilt remembered, grief obeyed, and the human habit of dressing wickedness in a shroud when plain clothes would do.

2 hr 35 min·No. 143

London and Wimbledon, spring 1902: when brilliant electrical engineer Laurence Brooke is found stabbed through the chest with a Moorish paper-knife in the locked study of Briarbank House — his safe unlocked, a sealed packet of technical papers missing, and a jealous painter-husband conveniently placed at the scene by a dog-walker's testimony — Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

1 hr 18 min·No. 137

Hertfordshire, 1898: a fifteen-year-old boy dies in sudden agony after luncheon, and the evidence points to an industrial poison linked to his grandfather’s chemical works—until the Victorian Detective notices the household’s smallest routine detail: a daily pressed lemon, a kitchen ice-chest that should have been empty, and fruit injected by syringe; as grief hardens into suspicion inside Maybury House, the inquiry turns from public scandal to private tyranny, where loyalty, dependence, and long-trained silence prove more corrosive than any compound, and a murder meant for one man strikes another instead; inspired by historical crime of its era while remaining entirely fictional, The Pressed Lemon is an original classic-detective mystery about accidental victims, domestic power, and the fatal cost of “ordinary” cruelty.

1 hr 8 min·No. 134

Denham, 1892: a reliquary vanishes and a man dies upon the bell-stair, and the village responds with whispers—devotion, theft, and piety worn like armour—until the Consulting Detective and his loyal companion arrive to read the church itself as evidence: an altered bell-rope, organ pipes that conceal more than music, pawnbroker ledgers, and clues arranged with the tidy discipline of a hymn; The Blackwood Reliquary is an original Victorian-style mystery about quiet motives, misjudgment, and the single small detail that turns certainty into truth.

45 min·No. 127

In spring 1902, Sherlock Holmes is summoned to the West End when a celebrated Bond Street couturier is found dead in his bath with a telephone receiver in his hand, and what looks like a tidy accident becomes a ruthless design: a suspicious call that places the victim “alive” at the wrong hour, a Mayfair luncheon poised on money and engagement, and an American fashion journal that reveals betrayal in New York before London ever applauded; as Holmes and Dr.

1 hr 27 min·No. 115

In autumn 1894, Sherlock Holmes is summoned from Baker Street to a rain-soaked county town where a chapel coronet is stolen, an innocent youth is arrested on a description that fits his borrowed clothes, and the case explodes into violence when a prison warder is shot dead during a staged “escape” and a bill-poster is murdered before he can speak; as Holmes and Dr.

1 hr 48 min·No. 113