Write Your Own Sherlock Holmes Story

There are seventeen steps up from the street door of 221B Baker Street, and every kind of trouble in London has climbed them. The sitting room at the top keeps its own weather: tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper, correspondence transfixed to the mantelpiece by a jack-knife, a chemical table that has scarred the deal boards, a patriotic V.R. picked out in bullet-pocks over the settee, and two armchairs either side of a fire that burns most of the year — for the fog outside these windows is not a mood but a working condition. Mrs. Hudson endures it all with the patience of a saint, provided visitors wipe their feet and gunfire is kept to reasonable hours.