You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

This week we're looking at the life of a man who nearly became suffocated by his own creation.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories.

He died in 1930 and there are just two recordings of him.

Let's listen to a little of one of them.

With regard to Sherlock Holmes, I was, when I wrote it, a young doctor,

and had been educated in a very severe and critical medical school of thought,

especially coming under the influence of Dr. Bell of Edinburgh,

who had most remarkable powers of observation.

He prided himself that when he looked at a patient he could tell not only their disease, but very often their occupation and place of residence.

Reading some detective stories, I was struck by the fact that their results were obtained in nearly every case by chance.

I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell treated

disease and where science would take the place of chance.

...