THE deer-stalker has been dusted off, the pipe packed and the magnifying glass polished. Sherlock Holmes is to make his first official return to the printed page since the death of his Scottish creator 75 years ago.

In what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have called The Case of the Homecoming Hero, the sleuth investigates his first murder in Scotland.

The Italian Secretary, written by the American thriller writer and historian Caleb Carr, is the first novel to be commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate.

Described as “a further adventure of Sherlock Holmes”, the book is set in 19th-century Edinburgh and sees the detective and his trusty companion Dr Watson summoned to the cobbled stones of Auld Reekie to investigate a spate of murders at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Holmes is persuaded to take the case by his brother, Mycroft, who is charged with ensuring the safety of Queen Victoria.

On arrival in Edinburgh, Holmes concludes there is a link between the killings and that of David Rizzio, personal secretary to Mary Queen of Scots, who was stabbed to death at the palace in 1566.

A bloodstain that reappears each day in the room where Rizzio was murdered and mysterious voices in the night are just some of the intriguing puzzles that Holmes sets out to solve during his investigation.

It is the first time in a celebrated career of crime fighting that the violin-playing detective has left his Baker Street residence to solve a crime in the country of his creator’s birth.

Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. Though he later moved south, publishing his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, in London in 1887, he maintained close links with Scotland.

Carr, who will appear at August’s Edinburgh International Book Festival a week after the book is published by Little Brown was initially commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate to write a Holmes short story.

However, when the writer submitted 65,000 words, the estate was so impressed with his work it decided it should be published as a new novel.

The history of the Conan Doyle estate is as intriguing as a plot of one of the author’s own novels.

Conan Doyle died in 1930 leaving the rights of his novels to his widow, Jean, and their three children. They then passed to the widow of his son, Dennis, before being bought by the film producer Sheldon Reynolds, whose ex-wife currently holds the rights.

“The book respects Conan Doyle’s style,” said Hilary Hale, Little Brown’ UK editor. “Caleb picks up on hints that are contained in the original novels. He has always been a real fan of Conan Doyle’s work. Though he was meticulous in his research of the details, such as train timetables, there really was very little that he didn’t know about the books beforehand.”

Carr was inspired to set the book in the Scottish capital after a trip to Edinburgh last year, during which he visited Holyrood House, the Queen’s official residence in Scotland.

During his research, Carr discovered that a fountain in the palace grounds was one of the few commissions completed by Conan Doyle’s father Charles, a civil servant and little known sculptor.

Jon Lellenberg, a trustee of the Doyle estate, said he was surprised the author had never set any of his famous novels in the Scottish capital.

“There are some early touches of it in the first Sherlock Holmes tale, in which he placed the first murder in Edinburgh’s Lauriston Road, near one of Conan Doyle’s boyhood homes in Edinburgh,” he said. “But he never took Holmes and Watson to Scotland. I like to think Sir Arthur would be pleased to see them in Edinburgh at last.”

The new book has been widely welcomed by Sherlock Holmes scholars and aficionados. However, Alan Riach, head of Scottish literature at Glasgow University, sounded a word of caution. He said the book sounded “great fun”, but warned that it might lack Conan Doyle’s subtlety.

Riach also argues that while the author never wrote a book in his home country, there are hints of both Scotland and Edinburgh in his work.

“The stories are told very simply, even bluntly, but they are carefully coded,” he added. “In many ways The Hound of the Baskervilles could be set in Rannoch Moore (in the Highlands), and Doyle’s London, with its winding alleyways, is Edinburgh, where Stevenson created Jekyll and Hyde.

“There’s a pleasure in the oblique style of his stories. I’m not sure that the true Sherlockian will want the new novel to reveal too much.”

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