Silver Blaze

On a remote stretch of Dartmoor, Silver Blaze, England's most famous and valuable racehorse, has gone missing. The trainer's body has been found on the moor, and sheep have been savaged nearby. The local police, bewildered, do what bewildered police do: they charge Fitzroy Simpson, a well-known figure in the racing world, with the murder, and call it solved. Holmes is called in to find the horse, and he quickly discovers that the easy version of events is fiction.

The truth, as it emerges, is less comfortable. The trainer's own scheme killed him, and the famous horse was never stolen at all. Holmes's trick here is asking what did not happen, and the answer, as every reader of the story knows, involves a dog that did nothing in the night-time. The episode keeps that moment, and it lands. The case also gives Watson a proper job to do, which is always welcome, and takes the viewer around a racing stable that feels genuinely lived-in.

Brian Mills directed, from John Hawkesworth and Conan Doyle. Peter Barkworth's Colonel Ross is properly stiff, Barry Lowe makes Straker a man with a plan, and Jonathan Coy's Fitzroy Simpson spends the piece looking wrongly accused in a way that makes you certain he is innocent. Malcolm Storry's Inspector Gregory does the honest police work, with Manda-Jayne Beard, David John, Sally Faulkner and Rosalie Williams in support.

The mystery is one of the famous ones, and the adaptation treats it with respect. It helps that the moor looks magnificent, and that Brett, in a flat cap and on horseback, is having a fine time. The race at the end is a proper set piece. And the answer to the whole business, as these answers usually are, was hiding in plain sight. It is also one of the stories where Holmes is at his most theatrical, and Brett clearly loves every minute of it.