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This episode is brought to you by The Fashionable World.

Tonight, we'll read the first half to the adventure of the empty house written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as part of the return of Sherlock Holmes.

It was first published in 1903. The second half will air next week.

Public pressure forced Conan Doyle to bring the sleuth back to life and explain his apparently miraculous survival after his struggle with Professor Moriarty in the final problem.

This is the first home story set after his supposed demise in Switzerland as recounted in the final problem.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

I'll act your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths.

It was in the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested in the fashionable world dismayed by the demise of the honorable Ronald Adir under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances.

The public had already learned those particulars which came out in the police investigation, but a good deal was suppressed upon that occasion, since the case for the prosecution was so overwhelmingly strong that it was not necessary to bring forward all the facts.

Only now at the end of nearly 10 years am I allowed to supply those missing links which make up the whole of that remarkable chain.

The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing to me compared to the inconceivable sequel which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life.

Even now after this long interval I find myself thrilling as I think of it and feeling once more that sudden flood of joy, amazement and incredulity which utterly submerged my mind.

Let me say to that public which has shown some interest in those glimpses which I have occasionally given them of the thoughts and actions of a very remarkable man that they are not to blame me if I have not shared my knowledge with them.

For I should have considered it my first duty to do so had I not been barred by positive prohibition from his own lips which was only withdrawn upon the third of last month.

It can be imagined that my close intimacy with Sherlock Holmes had interested me deeply in crime and that after his disappearance I never failed to read with care the various problems which came before the public.

And I even attempted more than once for my own private satisfaction to employ his methods in their solution though with indifferent success.

There was none however which appealed to me like the tragedy of Ronald a deer.

As I read the evidence at the inquest which led up to a verdict of willful assassination against some person or persons unknown.

I realized more clearly than I had ever done the loss which the community had sustained by that of Sherlock Holmes.

There were points about this strange business which would I was sure have specially appealed to him and the efforts of the police would have been supplemented or more properly anticipated by the trained observations in the alert mind of the first criminal agent in Europe.

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