In this volume we see what it is when one extraordinarily talented person is the British Government as Mycroft Holmes applies his skills in statecraft to tax evasion, royal honors, Partygate, the 1918 Armistice, and the Abdication crisis of 1936.

Why is Ignatius Foley, member of parliament for Perth, so anxious to retrieve some administrative documents that have fallen out of his pocket at his fiancée’s house? His betrothed, Jean Leckie, wants to find out. And what has happened in Bulgaria that makes Mycroft so anxious to dispatch his...

Two kings, a model, a traitor, two wombats, two poets, an accountant, more lobbyists than you can count, three titans of business, two artists, a pawnbroker…and Sherlock Holmes....

How do you make a government change its mind? And how do you recover your financial equilibrium after a bereavement? And, come to that, how do you recover your financial equilibrium after you return from the apparent dead when you have asked for no mention of your return be made in the press and...

Watson spends half his wound pension on the turf and his gambling addiction renders him unable even to pay his half share of the rent of the rooms at Baker Street. But when one of his rare bursts of prosperity enables him to buy two strikingly good pictures from a pawnbroker, Mycroft Holmes...

"Draw your chair up, good Watson, and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.” After these words bring The Noble Batchelor to a close, Holmes lets his emotionless façade slip by the Baker Street fireside as he tells...

It is Easter 1916. As young men go to the trenches in their millions, they take with them A. E. Housman’s collection of poetry, A Shropshire Lad. “Easy to read in the most difficult circumstances and full of happy memories of home”, opines Mycroft Holmes. But has Housman succumbed to...

It was in November 1940 that a senior minister at the British foreign office in blacked-out London commissioned Holmes and Watson to go to Berlin to negotiate a prisoner of war swap with the German high command....

Another encounter with Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, hereditary king of Bohemia, and Holmes’ commissioner in Sherlock Holmes and a Scandal in Bohemia. The king is no longer with his first wife and has organized a ball at the Savoy Hotel in London to choose a new bride. But the...

The first thriller about accountancy. Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, and Mary Harris Smith, the world's only female accountancy practitioner investigate the activities of Marylebone Cole Supplies Limited. Listeners may be reminded of a more recent accountancy which...

A dramatised version of Arthur Conan Doyle's Bruce-Partington Plans is followed by that story's chilling sequel, The Sleeper's Cache. Missing blueprints papers and then a missing spy. Who better than Sherlock Holmes to investigate?...

The harrowing sequel to A Case of Identity as Sherlock Holmes uncovers a tale as dark as anything seen on the Ancient Greek stage...

The King of Nova Alba, in this new stage-play version of the story, approaches Sherlock Holmes to discover who killed the king’s predecessor. Shakespeare wrote comedies, tragedies, and histories, but he never got around to writing a whodunit, and this mixture of the Bard and Baker Street fills...

Three Holmesian Meditations: Mr Devine’s Original Problem, A Four Pipe Contemplation, and Some Epiphanic Reasoning Holmes receives his most illustrious client yet as he is consulted by Mr Devine on an unusual matter. Mr Devine has apprehended two malefactors in a well-watered garden in the...

It is the last night before Watson’s second wedding. Holmes tells Watson of his utter vanquishment by an adversary he never met in a tale set in 1880s Germany and featuring Goethe, Beethoven, Karl Benz, and Bertha Benz. By the end of this story, the listener would have found out about...

It is March 1938. A print worker petitions Holmes about the disappearance of a fellow worker at the Daily Mail. Holmes investigates, and after interviews with the newspaper’s proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, and with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador, it becomes clear the missing...

Mycroft gives Holmes an urgent commission to find documents hidden by Oberstein, the spy arrested at the end of The Bruce Partington Plans, although this commission arises out of a diplomatic deal over which Holmes has the gravest misgivings. In a coup de maitre, Holmes finds the documents at...

It is May 1940. The British army has been routed and is awaiting its evacuation. Winston Churchill asks Holmes to stand by to provide advice on what steps to take in the face of the anticipated aerial onslaught of the Luftwaffe on British airfields. As German attacks mount, Holmes offers...

The sequel to canonical story "The Three Students". Holmes and Watson are just back at their quarters, having solved the case, when the wrongdoer they have just identified interrupts their breakfast. A fourth student, his main rival in the long jump, is behaving in a very peculiar manner and is...

Five more sizzlingly scandalous Sherlock Holmes stories from the pen of Orlando Pearson....