In the year 1903 - the exact moment is now lost to history - Sherlock Holmes proclaimed to the world he was quitting England's Capital to go into retirement on a small, wind-swept farm in the Sussex South Downs. His shocked comrade-in-arms Dr. John H. Watson was later to write, 'The decision took me utterly by surprise. I thought I had become an institution around Holmes, like his Stradivarius, or the old, oily black clay pipe and his index books.'...