TUNING IN SHERLOCK, by John Longenbaugh

An Overview of Sherlock Holmes’s Long History on Radio

Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most celebrated Consulting Detective, is older than radio itself by a few years—he first appeared in print in 1887, six years before Nikolai Tesla made the first tentative experiments in wireless communication.But Holmes was also at the very beginnings of radio drama, and he’s still being heard on the air and on the internet, via both amateur and professional companies, who continue to produce their own original stories featuring the world’s most celebrated sleuth.

(So for the record, that means Holmes has the longest run of any fictional character in radio—Take that, Lone Ranger!)

What is it about Holmes that fits the medium of radio so well?

Part of the appeal for radio is that when it comes to Holmes, the listener’s imagination is already primed to meet the story more than halfway. The hawk-like visage and deerstalker cap, the gaslight eerily haloed above the fog-enshrouded streets, the cozy if eccentric accoutrements of 221B Baker Street—each person has a perfect picture of this late-Victorian world, and it takes little more than the recorded sound of a jingling hansom cab or a snatch of violin music to evoke it.

But the stories of Sherlock Holmes also fit themselves to radio because The Great Detective was always at his most effective in the form of the short story. With the brilliant exception of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle’s hero was always happiest solving a crime in 30 pages or so, or the equivalent of a half-hour of radio listening. That’s not to say that the novels haven’t been successfully adapted to radio—there have been several versions over the years, including fairly recent adaptations of The Sign of Four and The Valley of Fear. But despite their quality and fidelity to Doyle’s books, it is hard to imagine it taking longer than a half hour’s narrative for Holmes to solve any particular crime before returning to his violin, his newspapers, and the noxious shag tobacco stored in the toe of his Persian slipper.

The first radio play featuring Sherlock Holmes aired on NBC in 1930, an adaptation of The Speckled Band starring the most famous stage actor to ever play Holmes, William Gillette, who came out of retirement to play the role aged 77. (He returned to play Sherlock for a Lux Radio Theatre abridged production of his famous stage version five years later.) Neither the 1930 nor 1935 recordings of Gillette still exist, but a bit of dialogue from the actor recorded to test out some sound equipment from 1936 still survives, a short exchange with Watson discussing Professor Moriarty and one with an actress playing Alice Faulkner, his love interest created by Gillette for his acclaimed stage adaptation. (Gillette, who wrote the dramatization with the blessing of Conan Doyle himself, asked if he could marry Holmes off at the end of the play. “You may marry him, murder him, do anything you like,” said his creator.) Although the surviving recording is only a few minutes long, Gillette is exuberant in the role, and it’s thrilling to hear the performance of one of the most critically acclaimed Holmes ever.

Immediately following this inaugural radio performance, actor Richard Gordon took over and played Holmes until 1933, when tired of the role, he left and Louis Hector took over the role of Holmes. (Hector occasionally played the role of arch-villain Professor Moriarty through the 1930s.) Leigh Lovell played Watson to Gordon’s Holmes from 1930 till his death in 1935, and Gordon returned to play Sherlock for several months in 1936 with a new Watson, Henry West.

As to the few number of shows that still exist featuring Gordon and Hector, these shows aren’t the best, and not just because of the poor quality of the recordings. While Lovell’s Watson is an engaging performance, he’s also a bit of an old duffer. And Gordon’s interpretation is of a caustic and cold Holmes who’s also teetering on being elderly. Hector’s Holmes is in the vein of his predecessor, if not more so; at times he makes the Great Detective sound downright crotchety.

One important feature of these early shows, however, is that several of the episodes were original stories, not adaptations of Conan Doyle originals. The writer of these new adventures for Holmes was a woman, Edith Meiser, a strikingly attractive actress/playwright who was also an avid Sherlockian. Meiser started searching for a sponsor for her proposed Sherlock Holmes series in 1927, and it took her three years to find a sponsor, G. Washington Coffee. (As a result, Watson is drinking a cup of the very un-English beverage at the start of each episode.) Meiser began writing new tales when she ran low on adaptable material in the first season, originally adapting from other Conan Doyle stories like The Jew’s Breastplate which didn’t originally feature the Great Detective. Though she wrote these adaptations without any initial permission from the Conan Doyle estate, her work was praised by Conan Doyle’s children as first-rate. Meiser continued to work as the prime author on several different Sherlock Holmes series throughout the ’30s and mid-’40s, including one featuring the premiere duo of the era, Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

After their premiere in 1939’s film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Rathbone and Bruce were convinced to not only produce a series of follow-up films, but to take their performances to radio too. For many older people Rathbone remains the definitive Holmes, and radio highlights his gifts of quick intelligence and classically-clipped diction. Bruce’s Watson, on the other hand, is the same blustering nincompoop of the films, if not more so—his repeated failure to grasp the obvious is at best a triumph of comedy over subtlety. (Still, the radio productions often trump the films the actors made, in large part because the movies soon moved their detective to modern times for budgetary reasons.)

Eventually Rathbone grew tired of the role both on film and radio, though Bruce continued on with a new Holmes, Tom Conway, doing a serviceable Rathbone impersonation. When the show moved to the East Coast in 1947, Bruce and Conway both dropped the roles and were themselves replaced first by John Stanley as Holmes and Alfred Shirley as Watson, then two years later Ben Wright as Holmes and Eric Snowden as Watson, who saw the series to its end in 1950. With each of these later actors the definitive imprint of both Rathbone’s and Bruce’s performances is clearly evident, though the scripts seem to be increasingly dumbed down, as there were apparently worries from sponsors that the mysteries were too difficult for the audience to follow.

Of course, Holmes was also parodied and featured across many shows in the Golden Age of Radio, including the Jack Benny Show (where Jack played a Holmes in pursuit of a penthouse murderer who turns out to be King Kong), and Fred Allen on the Texaco Star Theatre, featuring a sketch in which Allen plays Consulting Detective Fetlock Bones. (Those who enjoy this sort of pun-filled irreverent romp might enjoy counterculture audio humorists The Firesign Theatre’s 1974 album The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which sets their detective Hemlock Stones on the famed rodent’s elusive trail.)

And there was an early attempt at gender reversal in 1946’s Meet Miss Sherlock, in which a clever young woman named Jane Sherlock, “as smart a little gal as ever stumbled across a real live clue,” solves crimes. Despite some horribly sexist lines like these from its introduction, the surviving episodes of the show are a moderately entertaining light mystery series. The template of Jane and her boyfriend Peter seems to be Gracie Allen and George Burns, with Jane concealing her native intelligence behind a scatter-brained persona.

Yet while the golden age of American radio drama was winding down, in Britain it remained a vital entertainment. And in fact the first great Holmes and Watson of British radio began two years later in 1952. (Prior to this date there had been a few adaptations of individual stories, but no ongoing series.) Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley, who played the roles in several series running up to 1969, performed in adaptations of Conan Doyle’s originals, including excellent multi-part versions of the Holmes novels, whose length generally precluded them from adaptation in America. The series has fine audio quality and the scripts are tremendously faithful to the stories. Both actors are solid, but to my mind Hobbs is too gentle and genial as the sometimes unbearable detective, and while Shelley is an improvement over Bruce’s blustering caricature, the template is the same: a well-meaning but dim sidekick who’s as English, and as unimaginative, as a bulldog.

One outstanding radio incarnation around this time is a 1954-55 collection of twelve episodes featuring two great British actors, John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson. The most successful aspect of this series is the deep and undeniable quality of mutual warmth that the two actors, life-long friends off the stage, bring to the roles. The series also benefits from a first-rate supporting cast, excellent production quality, and in the episode of The Final Problem, a bravura performance by Orson Welles as Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime.

(Welles himself played Holmes on radio once before, when he’d adapted the William Gillette Holmes play for an episode of his celebrated Mercury Theater program. It’s fascinating hearing his portrayal, seemingly modeled on Gillette’s performance, and makes one wish he’d assayed the role on film as well. For Welles buffs there’s also a superb 1943 episode of Suspense, “The Lost Special,” adapted from a Conan Doyle short story with Welles playing Herbert de Lernac, a villain of Moriarty-like brilliance.)

Various other notable radio productions include British actors Clive Merrison (as Holmes) and Michael Williams (Watson) who managed to complete a special BBC series between 1989 and 1998 of every Holmes story Conan Doyle ever wrote, and radio adaptations of stage plays by Gillette and Conan Doyle himself, produced under the title Sherlock Holmes Theater by Blackstone Audio Books. There’s also an ambitious BBC original special from 1981 of Sherlock Holmes Versus Dracula that you can find for download with a bit of internet sleuthing—in fact, most of these series can be found on the internet or via such old-time radio collections as OTRCAT.

Thanks to the new popularity of the Great Detective in both the BBC’s brilliant Sherlock series and the rather more run-of-the-mill CBS series Elementary, there’s more interest in Holmes than ever before, and more radio drama as well. The Sherlock Holmes Society of London has a good cross-section of productions performed by different British companies, including both stories from Conan Doyle and those by modern writers. Original stories such as The Long Man and The Grace Chalice are available for free download at http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/world/radio.php.

One man who’s continued Sherlock’s long run on radio is Seattle actor/author/radio impresario Jim French, who began his career as a writer on Suspense in the 1950s. French has been producing original Sherlock Holmes radio plays since 1998 as part of his Imagination Theatre. This is distributed to over 120 stations across the country, and recently published its 16th collected CD set of original adventures featuring the detective. French’s series remains the only radio incarnation of Holmes officially authorized by the Conan Doyle estate. First with the late John Gilbert and now John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes, the series features the star of French’s hardboiled Harry Nile series, Larry Albert, as Watson.

French’s adaptations are high quality and well-acted, exhibiting the sort of seasoned production craftsmanship that once made radio shows such a delight. As far as plots, the stories tend more to the police procedural than some of the melodramatic cliff-hangers of the Rathbone/Bruce days. While this is keeping with the spirit of many of Conan Doyle’s original stories, it’s also not surprising from the creator of celebrated radio gumshoe Harry Nile.

There are hundreds of radio broadcasts of Sherlock Holmes, with dozens of performances, available via the internet and over the airwaves. And best of all, regardless of the actor’s interpretation or the source of the plot, it’s inevitably still Holmes—eccentric and infuriating, cold yet capable of surprising emotion, and always not just one step ahead of poor Watson, but of us as well.