The collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are a gift that just keeps on giving. Especially to television, where "Elementary" (CBS) and "Sherlock" (BBC America) currently deliver two very different iterations of the world's first and most famous consulting detective.
As it turns out, Doyle didn't just set the gold standard for fictional sleuths, he also provided the first detective-writer-as-actual-detective story line.
Long before characters like Ellery Queen, Jessica Fletcher or Richard Castle were mere notes on a page, Doyle used the powers of observation and deduction he had granted Sherlock Holmes to solve an actual crime and change the British judicial system.