Sherlock stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman could still be playing the successful sleuths in 20 years if the show's co-creator Mark Gatiss gets his way.

“This is not like one of those Pirandello plays,” mutters Javier Marzan at the end of the first half, shortly after his fellow performers have stormed from the auditorium, “no-one is acting here.”

Spoiler alert: this column not only discloses crucial details about the denouement of Ian Rankin's latest novel. It identifies the murderer in Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap - now celebrating its 60th birthday on the West End stage. So, if you genuinely care enough, au revoir and hasta la vista.

I see from the inscription in my Penguin paperback that it was bought on holiday in Ilfracombe, summer of 1976, so I must have been 12. Raffles was a joy to me then and, unlike other books of my youth, a joy still. The attraction of EW Hornung's character, who first appeared in 1899, was that he led not just a double but a triple life.

The American remake of British drama Sherlock will be extended into a 22 episode season to be broadcast on CBS.

An enigma has been solved in a most ingenious way – the solver cutting through the preconceptions of fuzzier minds and delivering the solution with a flourish. What was inexplicable has been unfolded and smoothed flat. Impossible knots have been deftly loosed and unravelled.

Out of America: The guardians of Raymond Chandler's estate have authorised a Booker winner to bring the author's hero back to life

A publisher of adult fiction is giving literary classics such as Jane Eyre and Pride And Prejudice an erotic makeover.

You're carrying a bit of weight round your middle. I can see a Mars bar in your bag and I can tell from a glance that your BMI is waaaay off. Don't tell me – you must be a Gemini.

A High Court challenge to a plan to redevelop the Victorian house where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Hound Of The Baskervilles has succeeded.

A painful cut to the BBC's reinvention of the classic detective has left US fans in uproar

ITV’s Fred West dramatisation has picked up the most nominations for this year’s television Baftas, with its star Dominic West going head to head with Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch to be crowned leading actor.

By casting an attractive woman as Watson, CBS has neatly sidestepped one enduring source of Sherlock Holmes-based speculation: the seething homoerotic tension between the detective and his sidekick. In the BBC's hit show Sherlock, for example, Watson is frequently obliged to inform presumptuous strangers that he and Holmes are just good friends. By contrast, Guy Ritchie's macho movie adaptations seem convinced of the duo's flagrant heterosexuality.

He’s traditionally been Sherlock Holmes’ brave accomplice and a faithful chronicler of their sleuthing escapades.