Britain’s last southern wilderness, Dartmoor in Devon, beckons as the stage for the eerie tale of the spectral hound of the Baskervilles.

“How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Within a flash of being introduced to Dr. John Watson, Sherlock Holmes, “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine,” has looked him up and down and drawn a conclusion. The sleuth’s methods of deduction, first displayed in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, rarely failed him in four novels and 56 short stories—allowing him to conjure whole case histories from the appearance of fingernails, trouser-knees and other seemingly trivial details.

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One hundred and fifty years after Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was born, the workaholic, hawk-faced “consulting detective” with a penchant for violins, morphine and cocaine, remains an icon of English literature. (Fervent Sherlockians insist that Doyle was merely the literary agent in the set-up, while the slightly dim-witted Watson played Boswell to Holmes’ Johnson.) Doyle’s tales were not the first modern detective stories, but they helped to pioneer an infant genre and set a benchmark for so many colorful English detectives that followed, from Agatha Christie’s Poirot to Ian Rankin’s Rebus.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin and the neat dovetailing of plots in Emile Gaboriau’s M. Lecoq tales, Doyle added the “science” of detailed observation and classification that he had learned as an Edinburgh medical student: An innovation perfectly in tune with the progressive, Darwinian age. Readers became hooked by the briskly moving, tight puzzles and the Holmes-Watson double act. Sherlock was no prosaic “Plod”; he was a pipe-smoking aesthete with a cool, creative touch:

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” asks the inspector in “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” the Dartmoor-based tale of a vanished racehorse.

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Holmes replies.

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident.”

Such laconic exchanges have fans gleefully throwing their deerstalker hats in the air. Equally memorable are the stories’ Victorian landscapes of yellow-fogged, gas-lit London, dashing hansom cabs and England’s wild, Gothic countryside. Come, Watson, come, the game is afoot: Though times have changed, you can still walk in the footsteps of Doyle and his sleuth, indeed a whole niche tourist industry has grown around doing just that.

First stop is London, where a statue of Holmes outside Baker Street underground station welcomes travelers. Look up the world-famous address 221b Baker Street, where Holmes shared rooms with Watson, or at least the Sherlock Holmes Museum that has taken the address and evokes his residence with atmospheric detail.

You can also join Original London Walks, which does a popular trade in guiding visitors to scenes of Sherlockian significance: Charing Cross where Holmes caught a spy, the alleys of the Strand, Covent Garden where the Christmas goose was procured in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and so forth. Investigations reach a fitting conclusion at The Sherlock Holmes pub and restaurant on Northumberland Street, formerly the hotel in which Sir Henry Baskerville stayed when he came to claim his inheritance in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Menus feature Doylean dishes like “A Scandal in Bohemia” duck and you can view a recreation of Holmes’ study and sitting room, plus other artifacts: Including copies of Sidney Paget’s noted illustrations from the Strand Magazine which serialized the Sherlock Holmes tales.

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