"The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" fourteenth in a list of his nineteen favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.

West was a young clerk in a government office at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, whose body was found next to the Underground tracks near the Aldgate tube station, his head crushed.

He has, however, died, apparently of a broken heart from the loss of his honour when the papers were stolen, according to his brother Colonel Valentine Walter.

Sidney Johnson, the senior clerk, tells Holmes that, as always, he was the last man out of the office that night, and that he had put the papers in the safe.

Acting on information from Mycroft, and on what he has learnt thus far, Holmes identifies a person of interest: Hugo Oberstein, a known foreign agent who left town shortly after West's murder.

Some small reconnaissance shows Holmes that Oberstein's house backs onto an above-ground portion of the Underground line; furthermore, owing to traffic at a nearby junction, trains often stop right under his windows.

Holmes and Dr. Watson break into Oberstein's empty house and examine the windows, finding that the grime has been smudged, and there is a bloodstain.

Holmes posts a similarly cryptic message in the Daily Telegraph demanding a meeting, signing it Pierrot, in the hopes that the thief might show up at Oberstein's house.

He redeems himself somewhat by agreeing to write to Oberstein, whose address on the Continent he knows, inviting him to come back to England for the fourth, vital page.

The 1986 television film The Twentieth Century Approaches, the fifth instalment of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, features the story.

The story was adapted by Edith Meiser as an episode of the American radio series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

[16] The story was adapted for the BBC Light Programme in 1967 by Michael Hardwick, as part of the 1952–1969 radio series starring Carleton Hobbs as Holmes and Norman Shelley as Watson.