Write to James Leavey

Back in 1887 when his first case, A Study in Scarlet, was published, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's gimlet eyed know-all received a modest reception from the public. Now all you've got to do is don a deerstalker, stuff a Calabash pipe in your mouth and ask someone the way to Baker Street. You'll immediately be recognised as a keen Sherlockian, if not the man himself. Coachloads of Japanese or Americans tourists will dog your steps and, if you can find a suitably drooling mask for your mutt, Baskerville (as in Hound of), you'll make a small fortune in signed photographs.

So, suitably garbed, with a magnifying glass in one hand and some dog biscuits in the pocket of my Inverness cape, I set of across London in search of the Great Detective's haunts.

"The game's afoot!" I yelled, indicating my destination on the map to Bert, the driver of the black four-wheeler cab (there wasn't a Hansom in sight) hailed outside Charing Cross station. The latter was where a criminal named Matthews knocked out Holmes's left canine in the waiting room, in ‘The Empty House’.

"There's the White House, the Kremlin and 10 Downing Street, but they're probably not as well known as 221b Baker Street, immortalised as the address of Sherlock Holmes from around 1881 to 1903, until his retirement to Sussex Downs to study beekeep-ing," said Bert over his shoulder as he drove off. I sat back astonished by this unexpected display of knowledge. "It's elementary, mate," explained Bert, "when you get as many tourists as I do, all asking to be taken to the same address."

As we transversed the city, I noticed that the Victorian pea-souper fog had been replaced by fumes from countless horseless carriages. Alas, most of the 50,000 horses that had worked in London a century ago had long gone. As had the manure-coated cobbles. Only the street vendors, itinerants, vagrants and traffic jams remained, and the average Hansom cab speed of about 9 miles per hour.

When we eventually arrived at 221b Baker Street, I found it had been Abbey National's London headquarters since 1944, and Abbey House since 1932. A bronze plaque celebrating the company's special relationship with Sherlock Holmes was unveiled by the late, and much celebrated television Sherlockian actor, Jeremy Brett, in 1985. Apart from that the only visible homage to Holmes was a mock antique leather-topped desk inthe company's press office, manned by Gug Kyraicou, official secretary to Holmes since April 1994.

"Since 1949, Abbey National has received and dealt with between 30 and 40 letters a week, sometimes whole bagfuls, addressed to Sherlock Holmes," said Gug. "They're mostly from kids who sometimes ask for help in solving minor mysteries such as finding lost pets."

Gug dutifully replies to every letter, enclosing a free goody bag containing a booklet, a highly collectable set of commemorative stamps, and a badge, informing enquirers that: "Mr Holmes has now retired to Sussex where he spends his time reviewing the records of his cases and keeping bees..."

A short stroll led me to other dedications to the Great Detective, which abounded everywhere I looked. Even Baker Street underground station's ticket hall (refurbished for the opening of the Jubilee line in 1979), middle concourse and Bakerloo line platforms were clad in duo tone tiling featuring a total of about 50 silhouettes of Holmes.

Baker Street itself now boasts a Sherlock Holmes pharmacy and newsagent. At No.108, you can unwind in a large Victorian porce-lain bath in the Sherlock Holmes Hotel's (0171 486 6161) Reichen-bach Suite. Or enjoy Mrs Hudson's Tea of finger sandwiches, hot toasted crumpets, muffins, scones, cake, clotted cream and preserves, served from midday till 6pm, in the Dr Watson's bar and lounge, or dinner in the 221b Eating House restaurant.

On the north side of Marylebone Road, the entrance charge to The Sherlock Holmes Museum at the other "221b" Baker Street (0171-935-886) seemed a trifle expensive. Also the exhibition wasn't located on what most Sherlockians believe to be the actual site of 221B. Nonetheless, it was a charming reconstruction of a Victorian three storey lodgings house (17 steps from the front door to Holmes's first floor study) and you were allowed to handle the curious range of exhibits, while the flames from mock coal fires helped shake off the chill.

Dr Watson's bedroom was on the second floor, next to Mrs Hudson's quarters. On display downstairs were fan letters to Holmes, including one from an 8-year-old in Japan, which ended: "PS Please give my love to your friend." The mind boggled at the unseemly possibilities.

I was met just outside the museum's front door by Sherlock's shorter lookalike, actor Stewart Quentin 'Holmes', who had been immersed in the role, full-time, for five years. His colleague, John Barrett 'Watson', now only works weekends, preferring to spend the rest of the week in medical publishing.

Strangely, neither could be found in BT's London Residential Phone Book, which currently lists the following entries: J Mor-iarty - 9, S Holmes - 19, Dr J Watson - 1, and J (as in Inspector?) Lestrade – 1.

"I live round the corner from Baker Street so it's quite handy," said Stewart from under his deerstalker, who hands out business cards and is the popular subject of foreign snapshooters. "Watson and I often go out in costume and recently turned up in a Hansom cab at Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard, where we caused quite a sensation."

A keen cryptologist, like his namesake, 'Holmes' directed me across the road to the Sherlock Holmes Memorabilia Society at 230 Baker Street, NW1 (0171-486-1426), where from Monday to Saturday they sell over 1,000 items of merchandise (including a deerstalker hat, _œ“24.95, a selection of magnifying glasses from £9.95 to £29.95, miniature violins, Meerchaum pipes, Persian slippers, bound copies of the original Strand Magazine, Sherlock Holmes Teddy Bears and fridge magnets).

Opened in July 1992 on the site known to Holmes's followers as ‘The Empty House’, part of the first floor has since been converted into a Victorian first class railway carriage - a scene from the story, ‘Silver Blaze’. Customers can have their photos taken sitting next to a life-sized model of the Great Detective, whose unlit pipe, unfortunately, dangles from its hand rather than its mouth.

The genuine Holmes displayed a vast knowledge of the uses and properties of tobacco in solving cases. He was an avid lover of the pipe, cigar andcigarette, which prompted his equally famous friend and biographer, Dr John Watson, himself an occasional pipesmoker, to note bitterly that Holmes was "...a self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco."

Holmes would often sit for hours enshrouded in smoke, pondering cases, and kept his shag (strong coarse tobacco, best avoided these days) in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and in assorted tobacco-pouches littered across the mantlepiece of his bedroom. Cigars were stashed in a coal-scuttle, as were pipes and tobacco.

Perhaps his most disheartening custom was to smoke a pre-breakfast pipe filled with the dottles and plugs left from the smokes of the previous day, which had all been carefully dried and collected on a corner of the mantlepiece.

Keenly interested only in anything relevant to his work, Holmes wrote a famous monograph based on his long study of tobacco ash. "I found the ash of a cigar, which my special knowledge of tobacco ashes enables me to pronounce as an Indian cigar," he informed Watson in the course of the investigation, ‘The Boscombe Valley Murder.’

"I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco. Having found the ash, I then looked round and discovered the stump among the moss where he had tossed it. It was an Indian cigar, of the variety which are rolled in Rotterdam."

In ‘The Sign of the Four’, Holmes again demonstrated his expertise with the statement: "...there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird's eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato."

It appears, unfortunately, that Holmes's extensive knowledge of tobacco was largely ignored by the police at Scotland Yard, who have since made up for this startling oversight.

Perhaps the most interesting place I encountered was The Sherlock Holmes Collection at the Marylebone Library, Marylebone Road, NW1 (0171 798 1206), although this closed collection of magazines (including a complete run of the Strand Magazine up to 1930), society journals, comics, film and stage scripts, cuttings, photographs, complete bibliography and about 1,000 books on Arthur Conan Doyle and his creation can only be viewed by spe-cial appointment. You can also buy a series of eight prints celebrating the centenary of Holmes, greetings cards or a tea-towel.

"The collection was started in 1951 when, for the Festival of Britain, St Marylebone Borough Council held a Sherlock Holmes exhibition of printed materials, artefacts - such as the Stuffed Giant Rat of Sumatra and the now famous reconstruction of Sherlock Holmes' sitting room," explained curator, Catherine Cook.

"The books and magazines formed the nucleus of the present collection, while the sitting room was permanently transferred and displayed on the first floor of what is now the Sherlock Holmes Pub in Northumberland Street, when it opened in 1957."

Footweary, my brain reeling, I flagged down another black cab, hastening to James Taylor & Son at 4 Paddington Street, W1 (0171 935 4149). Established in 1857, the shoemaker now offers a range of Sherlock Holmes handmade footwear from about £680 plus VAT (boots from £780, plus VAT), each taking about three months in the making. You can choose between The Sherlock Shoe (an elastic sided Cambridge), The Lestrade (suede chukka boots) or the Mrs Hudson (high laced Balmoral).

My cab passed St Bartholomew's Hospital where Young Stamford introduced Watson to Holmes, and the British Museum - an invaluable source of information used by Holmes in solving several cases.

I perceived that Holmes' old haunts - Simpson's restaurant in the Strand, the Cafe Royal - in front of which he was attacked by the henchmen ofBaron Gruner in ‘The Illustrious Client’, and the Langham Hotel - were still thriving as we weaved our way through the traffic to the Diogenes Club (also known as The Athenium, in Waterloo Place off Pall Mall, SW1), of which Sherlock's brother, Mycroft, was a founding member.

It was there where I bumped into Peter Harkness, publisher of the Sherlock Holmes Gazette. "I received a letter from a retired police detective in America asking me for an endorsement from Sherlock Holmes for his new agency," he said. "I wrote back politely to break the news that he might be on the wrong trail."

If I hadn't already possessed one, a real Inverness cape, made from Harris Tweed, could have been purchased from Cording's, the gentlemen's outfitters at 19 Piccadilly, W1 (0171 734 07830) either off-the-peg for about £250-£300, or made-to-measure for around £400. The rubberised cotton off-the-peg version costs around £250-£300.

Later, I made my way to the Sherlock Holmes section in the Murder One bookshop, Charing Cross Road, WC2 (0171 734 3484), which stocks over 1,000 different titles - anything in print on the subject in the English language. The most expensive item was the first bound volume of the complete works, signed by Conan Doyle, at £900.

Of the dozen or so different published versions of Sherlock Holmes's complete 56 stories and four novels in one volume, the best are those published by John Murray (out of print but avail-able from good second-hand bookshops), Penguin and Wordsworth (complete fascimile, from the original set of Strand Magazine, including illustrations).

Undoubtedly, the most interesting title was the authoritive and entertaining The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia by Matthew E Bunson (Pavilion).

Round the corner was Chinatown, which had moved from its original location in Limehouse to the area between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue. There was no sign of the vile opium den, the Bar of Gold, from ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, but Holmes's vice, cocaine, was still readily available in the usual 7 per cent solution from well-dressed scoundrels skulking in the West End's night clubs and bars.

My next steps took me along Whitehall, where Holmes made frequent visits, particularly to the diplomatic service and the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard. I was en route to The Sherlock Holmes Pub at 10 Northumberland Avenue, WC2 (0171 930 2644) where I met the co-manager, Robert Davie, in the first floor restaurant, the menu of which is in six lan-guages, while peering through the glass wall into Holmes's recon-structed study.

"All the London walks come here," said Davie, who is convinced the tavern is haunted by the ghost of a cellarman. "On some days the police have to move on five or six coachloads."

A telephone call to a communicative friend revealed that Holmes's fame had reached the ether. A freely available news conference on the Great Detective can now be accessed on the Internet. In a query regarding Holmes's relationship with Watson, one net surfer replied: "There is as much canonical evidence that Holmes was gay as there is that he was Mr Spock's ancestor."

It all seemed too much to bear and I dashed out to hail another four-wheeler. "Quick, take me to 221b Baker Street," I cried. "Which one?" asked the driver, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

Aha! That will be a three-pipe problem.