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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created, simply, the best-known and most lasting detective in literature. The fictional sleuths that came before were preamble to Sherlock Holmes; those that followed were all, in some way, derivative. Doyle's achievement is the more remarkable when one considers that Holmes is not, technically, a very accomplished detective, and a very strange person to boot: a cocaine-abusing, violin-playing, apparently asexual manic depressive and know-all.

The genius of the Holmes stories lies, in fact, in the voice of Watson, the bumbling Victorian Everyman: patient, loyal, no brighter than he should be, but definitely the sort of chap to go into the jungle with. Today, Conan Doyle's recipe seems, well, elementary: Holmes understands everything; Watson hardly understands anything at all; and the reader is balanced happily between them. Every hero-and-sidekick film, every tale of opposites working together, from Starsky & Hutch to Butch & Sundance, owes a debt to Holmes & Watson.

These delightful entertainments, so seriously written, struck an immediate public chord when they first appeared in the Strand Magazine in the late 19th century. They are fairytales of no little melodrama, but they endure down the ages because Doyle was such an effortlessly accomplished writer: his vivid characterisations, sense of timing, dialogue and sly humour work as well today as they did a century ago.

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Don't believe me? Pick a child, any child, and recite to them the following words: “Dr Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered. “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Then see if they do not beg you to read on.

The best? Conan Doyle himself considered The Speckled Band to be his finest story, and for an introduction to Holmes there is none better. But for my money The Hound of the Baskervilles is impossible to beat for sheer, shivering excitement. So far, this one tale has inspired no less than 24 films: more, I believe, than any other story outside the Bible.

One to read: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Ben Macintyre is an author and Times columnist whose books include The Napoleon of Crime, about “the real Moriarty”

TLS reviews a biography and a collection of Conan Doyle’s letters

Ben Macintyre on the real life murder of which Conan Doyle was suspected

Arthur Conan Doyle’s obituary

10 things you didn’t know about Arthur Conan Doyle

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