Arthur Conan Doyle 
The Man with the Watches 

Like ‘The Lost Special’, ‘The Man with the Watches’ appeared in the ‘Strand’ (in 1898), and later in ‘Round the Fire Stories’ and ‘Tales of Terror and Mystery’. It follows the same pattern; the mystery this time surrounds the appearance of a dead man in a railway carriage, with six pocket watches in his jacket. An explanation is offered by an amateur detective but the narrator notes it is flawed, as it doesn’t take into account all the facts. A man involved in the accidental murder of the victim writes a letter to the detective, saying that it was a ‘mighty clever solution’ but entirely incorrect and continues to share the true events of that day. It shares the same backing for categorising as a Sherlock Holmes story as ‘The Lost Special’, and appears in French anthologies. The story was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2009 as ‘The Thirteen Watches’, in an episode from ‘The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’. The number of watches was changed because the new title came from a reference (in the Holmes story ‘The Noble Bachelor’) to Holmes’ involvement with the watches incident.