Lucy Worsley explores why Arthur Conan Doyle came to hate his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective in the world. He made his author, Arthur Conan Doyle, rich and famous. But the writer came to hate his fictional character. Through the changing world of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Lucy Worsley explores why.

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective in the world. For more than a century, he’s intrigued and excited his fans with his intellect and powers of deduction. He made his author, Arthur Conan Doyle, rich and famous. But the writer came to hate his fictional character. In this series, historian and lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, Lucy Worsley investigates this curious relationship between Holmes and Doyle; detective and author. In the first episode, Lucy unearths Holmes’ origins in Doyle’s life as a medical student. She unpicks the early stories, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain – from drug use to true crime. Lucy traces Doyle’s growing disenchantment with his detective, heading to Switzerland to visit the site of one of the most famous deaths in literature. In episode two, Lucy explores Doyle’s desire to distance himself from Sherlock. From the delights of the ski slopes, to the horrors of the Boer War, she reveals how far Doyle went to make himself a hero. Even taking on the role of detective himself, in one of the most important legal cases of the twentieth century. In the final episode, Lucy investigates the return of Sherlock. She finds that the darkness of the later stories mirrored the reality of Doyle’s life. After the loss of his eldest son, he became an evangelist for spiritualism and his star declined after a public spat with a very famous magician. Sherlock Holmes, in contrast, found a life beyond his author, on stage and screen.