The podcast audio-drama Sherlock & Co. is an updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in which the great detective is neurodivergent and gay, Dr Watson is a millennial who preaches against ethnic stereotyping, Lestrade is a woman who speaks with a Caribbean twang, and the society gossip Langdale Pike has morphed into a drag queen. Throw in the fact that it’s produced by Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger and you might imagine that we’re talking about a woke brew designed to repel conservative Holmesians like me.

Actually, Sherlock & Co. is my favourite podcast ever. I love it almost as much as Conan Doyle’s ur-text and infinitely more than the BBC’s Sherlock, which began well but then disappeared up its smug backside. In the past three years, author Joel Emery has reinvented 50 of the stories; by the end of next year he will have updated the entire canon, something never attempted before. But what matters is that he’s managing to combine imaginative daring with fidelity to the structure, if not the details, of the originals.

The Flydubai attacker’s motive was even darker than we thought

Has the plague broken out in Russia?

The Lebanonisation of Britain is well under way

In Sherlock & Co. there is an extra occupant........

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