Lucy Worsley on her brand new series Killing Sherlock

Sherlock Holmes is the world’s most famous fictional detective and features in more than 60 original stories, as well as countless adaptions. For over a century, he has intrigued and excited his fans with his intellect and powers of deduction, and he made his creator – the author Arthur Conan Doyle – rich and famous. But the writer came to hate his fictional character.

Over the course of three episodes, historian and lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan Lucy Worsley investigates the extraordinary love-hate relationship between Holmes and Doyle, detective and author, in a unique parallel biography of Sherlock Holmes and the complex man who created him.

Lucy unearths Sherlock’s origins in Conan Doyle’s early life as a medical student, unpicking his early stories and revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain – from drug use to true crime. She explores Doyle’s growing disenchantment with his detective creation and desire to distance himself from Sherlock, taking on the role of detective himself, in one of the most important legal cases of the 20th century; and investigates the darkness of his later stories, mirroring the reality of Conan Doyle’s life after the loss of his eldest son, his turn to spiritualism and declining public appeal and spat with a very famous magician. Sherlock Holmes, by contrast, found a life beyond his author, on stage and screen.

Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on The Case Of Conan Doyle airs Sunday 10 December, BBC Two at 9pm and will also available on BBC iPlayer.