Over the course of three episodes, historian and lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, Lucy Worsley investigates this curious relationship between Holmes and Doyle; detective and author.

In the first episode, "Doctor and Detective," Lucy unearths Sherlock Holmes’ origins in Arthur Conan Doyle’s early life as a medical student in Edinburgh. She unpicks the early stories, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain – from drug use to true crime. She explores how Doyle infused the stories with cutting edge technological developments, and ultimately 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, "Fact and Fiction," after the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, 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 the hero of his own story. Even taking on the role of detective himself, in one of the most important legal cases of the twentieth century.

In the final episode, "Shadows and Sleuths," Lucy investigates the return of Sherlock. Doyle began the Edwardian age delighting in all it had to offer, but as the First World War approached, Lucy 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.

Throughout the series, Lucy Worsley explores the lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in the historical context of their time. From the dying years of Victorian England, through the imperial crisis of the Boer war, the optimism of the early Edwardian years to the trauma of the First World War – Arthur and Sherlock lived through them all.