The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is a Sherlock Holmes short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1904 and later collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Lady Eva Blackwell is a debutante whose engagement will not survive the publication of some letters, and Milverton, the man holding them, knows it. Holmes finds his visitor more repellent than the murderers he has dealt with, and the negotiation goes badly: Milverton wants seven thousand pounds and will not consider two. What follows is a burglary rather than a deduction, and the story keeps Holmes inside a house at night, listening to a conversation he was not supposed to hear and watching a crime he does not prevent. Conan Doyle wrote it as a study of a man whose trade is other people's shame, and the case ends without a courtroom, which is unusual in the series.

It belongs to the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1905, and it is one of the stories in which the law is not really the point.