Sherlock Homes

Am dining at Goldini`s 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.