I started to fall in love with Mary Russell from the first line of “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice”:  “I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes…”

The series, which started in 1994, now stands at fourteen books, of which I’ve read three so far. It’s nice to know I have at least another eleven before me.

BBC Radio 4 adapted the book and it seems there are now rumours of a movie, although the audiobooks are so evocative that I’d be almost reluctant to move media; film can be so assertive and so difficult to forget, it spreads like a gorse bush across the moors of my imagination, suppressing everything else.

Still, I thought fans might be interested by the video below. It’s a series of stills linked to the first chapter of “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice”, narrated by Jenny Sterlin