The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Landmark radio dramatizations of the entire canon, faithfully adapted.

- Jon L. Breen

Recently, I listened to a radio dramatization of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Basker villes. It was extremely well done, but the latter stages of the story introduced characters and incidents that I didn’t remember at all. I hadn’t revisited the novel in years, but I had seen the film version with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson multiple times, and that was the Hound I remembered. The radio version from Jim French Productions, with John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes and Lawrence Albert as Watson from an adaptation by M.J. Elliott, went back to Doyle’s original and followed it faithfully. This same trio have adapted and performed the entire canon of four novels and 56 short stories in audio versions. The result is now available in a handsome three-volume, 30-CD set, The Complete Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for $150.

Holmes and Watson are naturals for radio adaptation. The earliest American version is a 1931 production of “The Speckled Band,” with none other than playwright William Gillette himself as the great detective, from a script by pioneering Holmes adapter Edith Meiser. The first British adaptation, a 1938 version of “Silver Blaze,” had Frank Wyndham Goldie donning the deer stalker. In the 1940s, more well-remembered British actors took the role, including Cedric Hardwicke, father of a latter-day television Watson, and Arthur Wontner, who had earlier played Holmes on screen.