The year is 1947. Holmes has returned from war-ravaged Japan, having sought a rare plant said to have properties that can restore memory. At the farmhouse where he lives, he has a prickly relationship with his housekeeper Mrs. Munro Laura Linney), a war widow. He takes a grandfatherly interest in her son Roger (Milo Parker), a likely lad fascinated by the Holmes adventures he has read about in the books by Sherlock’s erstwhile partner, Dr. Watson. Holmes sets the boy straight on the fictionalized aspects of his own life — no deerstalker, no pipe — but relents when requested to do “the thing,” that is, to deduce where a person has been and what they have been doing just by finding clues in their appearance.