THE SERPENT UNDER by Bonnie MacBird (Collins Crime Club)

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SHERLOCK Holmes comes in many guises. He is the most portrayed literary character ever to grace the screen, from intellectual Basil Rathbone to ironic Robert Downey Jnr; from grim Boris Karloff to bonkers Benedict Cumberbatch.

Former Hollywood scriptwriter Bonnie MacBird’s sixth Holmes adventure since the character was freed into the public domain in 2013 finds the detective and diarist Dr John H Watson in their early 30s, both handy in a scrap and well-versed in the scientific advances of the Victorian era.

Think, then, Cumberbatch and Freeman in a twisty plot that cries out for TV adaptation as the frankly dynamic duo investigate not one, not two, but three cases: the discovery of a grotesquely tattooed body in Windsor Castle, the drowning of a street rat, and attempts to snuff out the growing women’s rights movement.

Called into action by Queen Victoria herself – she’s not amused – Holmes and Watson soon find the cases are linked, and involve Romany snake charmers, louche aristocrats, feuding siblings, artists and urchins.

There’s a high body count, life-and-death struggles – even at 221B Baker Street itself – and fast-paced derring do. The game is not just afoot, but off and running through the streets and alleyways of Victorian London like an Olympian.

The Great Detective comes within a whisker of meeting his maker, with a painting of Reichenbach Falls, where he will one day be presumed dead after his final encounter with nemesis Moriarty, ominously atop the mantelpiece.

It has been, writes Watson at the death, “perhaps the deadliest investigation of Sherlock Holmes’s career”. In time-honoured tradition, the final reckoning reveals all the clues that we’ve missed. It was inevitably elementary, dear reader … 

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