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SHERLOCK HOLMES ON RADIO, A Review by Carole Buggé

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

It is common knowledge among Sherlock Holmes fans that when his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, exhausted by the hold Holmes had over his life, tried to kill him off by plunging him unceremoniously off a precipice and into the swirling waters of Reichenbach Falls, he was forced—however unwillingly—to resurrect Holmes some three years later. The clamor of a public hungry for more tales of the great detective finally induced Doyle to bring Holmes back to life in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

Holmes had, in a sense, become Doyle’s Moriarty—his nemesis, his bete noire. The author’s own brainchild had assumed a stranglehold on his life—and, anxious to pursue what he regarded as his more “serious” work, Doyle felt there was no alternative but to do the fellow in once and for all. One is inevitably reminded of another great Edwardian master, Sir Arthur Sull­ivan, who suffered a lifelong frustration that his operatic collaborations with W.S. Gilbert took him away from what he regarded as his “serious” work. The irony for both men is, of course, the same: how many readers of this magazine—a subset of Doyle fans if ever there was one—have actually read The White Company? And although the music Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote outside of the famed operettas occasionally shows up on classical FM stations, it is not much of a departure from the gracefully melodic airs of The Mikado or H.M.S. Pinafore—and, lacking Gilbert’s witty, satirical lyrics, it strikes us as lilting and lovely, to be sure, but—well, slight. Together, Gilbert and Sullivan were magic. Apart, well . . . they needed each other to complete the other’s genius.

One might well say the same of Watson and Holmes. Or even of Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth. Doyle may have hated Holmes, and dreamed on long winter nights of killing off his greatest creation—but, in the end, he needed Holmes. And perhaps that as much as anything drove the onetime doctor to lure the famous detective to a certain death at the hands of his fictional nemesis, the delightfully unrepentant Professor Moriarty. (I like to play a little quiz game in my fiction classes. While delivering a lecture on the nature of a good antagonist, after telling them roughly how many Holmes stories Doyle penned, I ask the class how many of the stories Moriarty appears in. The answer is inevitably in the double digits—a testament to the impact of the deliciously evil Professor, who, as I’m sure most of you know, appears in only one story, The Final Problem, and is mentioned in passing in three.)

In fact, though Doyle could not be said to have invented the arch villain (perhaps that honor belongs to Shakespeare; Iago springs to mind, though there are surely other candidates)—Doyle added a level of modernity to him when he gave Moriarty superhuman genius, in addition to the usual qualities of cunning, ambition, and obsessive drive shared by other great fictional villains (Iago, Lady MacBeth, Javert, the Monte Cristo villain).

Happily, readers of our times are no more ready for Holmes to solve his last case than they were in Edwardian times. And so the Master lives on—in novels and stories penned by a wide range of Doyle devotees (for how can you hope to recreate his world if you don’t share a deep love for Holmes and Watson?)

Most people are familiar with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films of the 1930s and ’40s, and some readers may have heard the radio recordings from that era with Rathbone and Bruce reprising their film roles.

And there have, of course, been many other film, television, and radio versions of the great detective—some of them treatments of Doyle’s own stories, and some of them original stories from new writers (The Seven Percent Solution, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Secret Life of Sherlock Holmes, to mention just a few). And probably the most lavish treatment of the original Doyle stories is the gorgeously produced ­BBC/-­Granada Television series of the 1980s, starring Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke—maybe the best Holmes and Watson ever to appear—on film. Brett’s fidgety, restless Holmes and Hard­wicke’s quietly intelligent, noble Watson strike me as both the most personal and most faithful interpretations of Doyle’s characters.

The BBC/Grenada series is stunning to look at—one feels that every detail of life in nineteenth century London was researched and lovingly recreated by the production team. But there is something about Conan Doyle’s tales of adventure and intrigue that make them especially wonderful as radio drama. London of that time was a noisy city of richly textured sounds—the squawk of street vendors blending with the rattle of wooden cart wheels and the steady clip-clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, with Big Ben faithfully chiming out the hours in the background.

And now, thanks to Jim French Productions, Holmes lovers can savor the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes and his ever-trusty Watson in a handsomely produced series of radio plays, Sherlock Holmes Radio Mysteries. The recordings recreate the same nineteenth century London that Holmes fans have come to love, all in brand-new stories by Jim French himself that capture the essence of Doyle’s world beautifully.

I first came across the recordings when the music director of my own show, Sherlock Holmes: The Musical, gave them to me as a birthday present. I began listening to them in my cabin at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, New York, and I was soon hooked. (Our rustic cabins have no television reception, and so radio or tapes are the only source of electronic stimulation.)

For two glorious weeks, I never once missed my cable TV or my usual fix of Forensic Files. I had all the crime solving I needed—and in the much more intimate, personal medium of radio! Here were Holmes and Watson, together again, in the old familiar settings, sweeping out into the swirling London fog, their overcoats drawn tightly around them, in search of a Hansom cab, on the heels of the nefarious criminals lurking in London’s seedy underworld.

After gorging myself on the sixteen-episode set my friend had given me, I was delighted to see two more CDs awaiting me in the mail upon my return to New York City: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, yet another Jim French production.

The first thing you notice about the recordings is how rich and well-done the production values are. The opening theme is Camille Saint-Saens’s Dance Macabre—which, with its sliding, spooky opening violin solo of dissonant tritones, sets the mood perfectly (coincidentally, the same music is also the theme of the BBC’s mystery series Jonathan Creek). The incidental music in the French series, by Michael Lynch, is excellent, and serves to highlight the action and drama of the stories.

I was disappointed to see that the excellent John Gilbert had been replaced by John Patrick Lowrie as Sherlock Holmes in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but I need not have worried. Lowrie is a wonderful Holmes, and—whether by accident or design—he sounds uncannily like Basil Rath­bone. Lawrence Albert is a sensible, stalwart Watson; and many of the guest character actors (including Dennis Bateman, Ellen McLain, and Rick May as Inspector Lestrade) are delightful, ranging from drunken night watchmen to prissy upper class clients.

The actors’ English accents are not all uniformly convincing, but it is a minor point, and it would be churlish to point out which performers could use some work in the dialect ­department. More importantly, the spirit of the original is preserved in the carefully crafted stories and beautifully ­re­created scenes, often set in aurally interesting locations such as cavernous museums and Lon­don alleyways.

The first-person narrative by Dr. Watson, as in the original stories, is effective but never intrusive—most of the action is advanced through scene, action, and dialogue; and most of the stories contain very Doyle-like plot twists. Most of the time the live audiences are not apparent in the recordings, though in one amusing scene in which Holmes gives Mrs. Hudson (the delightful Lee Paasch) an impromptu acting lesson, you can hear giggles from the audience.

The plots are clever and engaging—especially impressive when one considers that each story runs less than thirty minutes. Jim French has been writing radio dramas for over thirty years, which is not surprising, given the quality of the Holmes mysteries. His company is called Imagination Theatre. Visit their website, HTTP://WWW.JIMFRENCHPRODUCTIONS.COM/, and they will tell you that it is “American radio’s premiere drama series, now heard coast to coast on well over a hundred radio stations in North America and by satellite on XM Radio.”

Out of Seattle, their weekly broadcasts “feature mystery, suspense, fantasy and adventure, produced by Jim French Productions before live audiences on a state-of-the-art recording stage.”

The Holmes stories that French has written were authorized by the estate of Dame Jean Conan Doyle, and a BBC host called the show, “One of the four best radio dramas in the English language.” To bring them to life, the website tells us, French studied the master’s original stories and delved into Victorian history. A visit to the website also offers glimpses of other intriguing mysteries and dramas available from Imagination Theatre: in addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories, there are the adventures of “a former Chicago cop turned hard-luck private detective named Harry Nile.” French created the character thirty years ago for a one-time-only broadcast, but audience response was enthusiastic, “and so began 26 years of episodes featuring Phil Harper as Harry, later to be joined by Pat French as his admiring and quirky associate, Murphy. Harry Nile has developed a large, devoted following, maybe because he’s had a hard life—kicked off the Chicago police force, hounded by a dirty cop who was on the take, battling his own gambling addiction, even losing his bride of one year in a gun battle.”

Also available on audio tape or CD are other tales of Raffles, which are “based on stories written by E.W. Hornung, the brother-in-law of Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” Raffles is “that fabulous rogue of Victorian society A.J. Raffles” (played by actor John Armstrong). Some of the stories available are “The Ides of March,” “A Costume Piece,” and a completely original play by M. J. Elliott “A Gift From the Gods.”

There are other delights to be found as well, such as Act One Audio from Topics Entertainment, a collection from the Movies for Your Mind series of Jim French mysteries, suspense dramas, Sci-Fi, and fantasy radio shows which first aired over KVI in Seattle in a series called Crisis.

So brew yourself a cup of tea (or indulge in something stronger—say, a decent glass of Port), put your feet up, fire up the CD player, and settle in to enjoy a jolly good adventure, courtesy of Jim French and friends!