Les Aventures de Sherlock Holmes

The pleasures here are small and exact. A single hat or sleeve becomes a full portrait of its owner. Holmes disappears behind his black clay pipe for a problem he judges will take three pipes and fifty minutes of silence, and chats about crocuses while menace gathers in the next room. "My life is one long effort to escape the ordinary," he says, and the cases oblige: orange pips scattered across a breakfast plate, a blue stone smaller than a bean that has caused murders, a grey manor with arms like the claws of a crab.

Holmes is cold-minded but not heartless. More than once he weighs mercy against strict law, and in a rare crack in his composure he admits, "He came to me for help, and I sent him away to his death!" Watson watches, loyal and often baffled; capable, Holmes tells him, of seeing everything and using none of it to draw a conclusion.

And behind it all, one figure Holmes never quite reasons away: Irene Adler, the one he only ever calls the woman. Twelve cases, each opening a door onto a London stranger than it first appears, because, as Holmes insists, real life is always bolder than anything invention could produce.