The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Based on the Original Radio Plays by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher [Hardcover]

Ken Greenwald (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Bdd Promotional Book Co; First Edition edition (May 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0792451074
• ISBN-13: 978-0792451075
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,446,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Find This Book, September 21, 2004

By 

Hound Dog (Boise, ID, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Based on the Original Radio Plays by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher (Hardcover)

If you enjoyed the classic Sherlock Holmes film series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as the original dynamic duo, you will enjoy this great collection of short stories adapted from the original radio plays produced in the 1940's.

Well-illustrated with drawings based on Rathbone and Bruce, the author delves into the so-called "lost adventures" of the great detective covering his exploits in the late 19th Century. While this book's Watson is distinctly different from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original character, the book is nevertheless an enjoyable addition to any Holmes fan's library.

Plus, if you enjoy this book, try to find the audio CD called "The Unfortunate Tobacconist," which features this same collection of stories as the original radio plays performed by Rathbone and Bruce.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun Stories For Fans of Old Radio and Holmes, October 17, 2005

By 

Bobby Underwood "starlighthotel" (Manly NSW, Australia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Based on the Original Radio Plays by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher (Hardcover)

There never has been anything quite like old-time radio in America. It was pure magic. It was adventure and drama, mystery and suspense, drifting through the night air into homes lit only by the orange glow of tubes warming up. Families gathered around the radio, carried away by their imaginations.

Author Ken Greenwald was one of those listeners, and one of his favorite shows growing up was Sherlock Holmes. For most of us, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce will always be Holmes and Watson. The films and radio shows are still watched on late night TV and listened to by old-time radio buffs like myself.

When radio archivist Ken Greenwald and a small group of friends discovered a long list of missing radio shows from 1945, written by great radio writers Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher, the idea of turning their original radio scripts into short stories was born. Greenwald has done a marvelous job of blending the two distinct mediums together.

You can easily picture Rathbone and Bruce in these fun adventures as Greenwald has kept the fast pace of the radio plays while fleshing them out a bit and adding the transitions necessary for the short story form. Greenwald gives us a baker's dozen here. My personal favorites are "The Adventures of the Headless Monk" and "The Adventure of the Iron Box." The former is filled with the atmosphere of the foggy moors and a dash of the supernatural, making this one a lot of fun. In the latter, Holmes hatches a clever scheme to solve a mystery shortly after the Christmas rush that will include, of all people, Sir Walter Scott!

How did Sherlock Holmes first meet Moriarity? Why in the world did Holmes buy that Sussex bee farm? Telling you which stories you'll find the answers to these questions would only ruin the fun. Enjoy!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "It shall always be Sherlock Holmes and Victorian England", January 1, 2003

By 

Jack Maybrick (Shuttling between the streets of Whitechapel and the shadow of Coogan's Bluff) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Based on the Original Radio Plays by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher (Hardcover)

This is a very enjoyable collection of stories based on scripts from the original radio plays.

Basil Rathbone was a "softer" version of Holmes. The original Sherlock could be hard and unfeeling - a machine as Watson often describes him.

That probably didn't play to audiences so, by comparison, Rathbone is just mildly eccentric. He's far more tolerant of the inability of Watson and others to keep up with him than is the original Sherlock.

It's a little as if someone had found the dichotomy betwen Hamlet's magnificent spirit and his fatal flaw disconcerting and had rewritten Shakespeare's classic to make Hamlet just a typical troubled young adult struggling with newfound freedom and responsibilties.

And Nigel Bruce's bumbling Watson is largely comic relief and equally unlike the original Conan Doyle version.

But at least the original radio playwrights kept the two heroes in late 19th century/early 20th century England. I think that most of the movies that Rathbone and Bruce made were set during World War II. I mean, no one could be a worthier contender against the Nazis than Sherlock Holmes, but still...

The story of how Holmes and Watson first meet Moriarty is unconvincing, as is the portrayal of Moriarty, and equally unconvincing is how, in "The April Fool's Adventure", Holmes finds all of the clues that the pranksters leave for him to find but doesn't see how they were intended to point to himself as the culprit. His inability to recognize himself is bewildering, and he must have forgotten to use his magnifying glass to look at the calendar.

But so what? When a classic is changed for mass market effect, the result is often disastrous, but not so here.

The bottom line is that all of the stories are very enjoyable. For all of the merit of the original Conan Doyle classics, they were written as a disagreeable chore to satisfy the public's demand for a character that Conan Doyle himself had quickly grown tired of.

These stories were crafted with a lot of love and care, and that might be why the two main characters themselves draw more affection than do the original versions.

Our debt to Conan Doyle for bringing us Sherlock Holmes is incalculable, but equally incalculable is our debt to his contemporaries for forcing the author to resurrect the great detective from (what we were led to believe was) the bottom of Reichenbach Falls. Perhaps the public also deserves credit for rescuing Holmes's humanity as well as his life from the clutches of his original creator, and perhaps this kinder, gentler Holmes is an example of this second rescue effort.

And speaking of Holmes's life, the last story in this collection provides a plausible explanation (entirely consistent with the Conan Doyle concordance) of why Sherlock Holmes cannot die. Literally. That's worth the price of admission, in and of itself.