The Return of Sherlock Holmes

From there the cases open like doors down a corridor. Chalk drawings of dancing men that terrify a Norfolk gentleman's American wife. A lord's son vanished from a school across the northern moors. A blackmailer with a plump, smiling face and a heart of marble. A string of shattered Napoleon busts leading to a stolen pearl. Each one turns on some small, overlooked thing: the dregs in a wine glass, two letters on a pencil stub. Holmes, cold and theatrical by turns, coaxes the extraordinary out of the mundane while Lestrade and his eager young colleague Hopkins watch their certainties come apart.

The stories are cerebral, but the puzzles are rarely only puzzles. Watson confesses that he "rejoiced and exulted" in danger, more thrilled as a lawbreaker than a lawman, and more than once the law proves too blunt an instrument for what these cases actually ask. Holmes lays a clean white cloth on the table before his flourishes, but he also weighs mercy against justice with his own hand.

Here is Conan Doyle at his most confident: puzzles that hold, a detective made human by vanity and loyalty both, and London rendered in gaslight and fog. The corridor runs on, and there are doors down it still to be opened.