Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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!

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.

For those of you who are enthusiastic fans of the irreplaceable Sherlock Holmes, this collection of short stories could be categorized and a must read. For those of you who grew up listening to the old radio shows (yes folks, there was a time when there was no T.V. and wonderful shows were presented in a pure audio format. I know this is difficult to believe, but they were actually fun to listen to and many of them had as larger a following as any modern television series), this too is a must read also. These old radio shows first started running in the 1940s. The first of the shows were based on the original stories by Conan Doyle, but later shows were based on the writings of two wonderful writers, Denis Green and Anthony Boucher. As far as I am concerned, these two writer's skill equaled that of Doyle in many ways.

This particular collection includes the stories:

The Adventure of the Second Generation

The April fool's Adventure.

The Case of the Amateur Mendicants

The Adventure of the Out-of-Date Murder.

The Case of the Demon Barber.

Murder Beyond the Mountains.

The Case of the Uneasy Easy Chair.

The Case of the Baconian Cipher

The Adventure of the Headless Monk.

The Case of the Camberwell Poisoners

The Adventure of the Iron Box.

The Case of the Girl with the Gazelle.

and

The Adventure of the Notorious Canary Trainer.

The entire collection is introduced by Dr. John H. Watson, July 25, 1888.

Each of these stories captures perfectly the essence of Sherlock Homes and Dr. Watson, and in doing so, captures, in the minds eye not only those to fictional characters, but those of Basil Rathbone and Nigle Bruce. The authors have also answered many small questions that were left unanswered in the original Doyle stories such as how and when did Sherlock Holmes meet Professor Moriarty and why did Sherlock Holmes buy his Sussex bee farm? Many, many little loose ends are nicely tied together here. I must admit that I found a certain child like glee in finding the answers to these questions. Everything you will find in the pages of this work goes perfectly with the original work...i.e. it is all in its proper place, it is all logical and makes perfect sense.

Ken Greenwald, the author of this book, has done a wonderful job of transforming the original lost radio scripts into narrative form and the stories have lost nothing in his interpretation. As has been suggested already by other reviewers, I too strongly suggest that you place Rathbone and Nigle in your mind as you read these stories. This is easy to do if you know the characters and adds so much to their reading.

All of these stories stay completely true to the Doyle tradition and I was grateful and pleased that none of the writers involved here attempted to muck about and try to improve on what is very near perfection already.

Finally, do you want to know why Sherlock Holmes cannot and will not ever die? The last story in the book addresses this. The reason is.........

Don Blankenship

The Ozarks

Author Ken Greenwald has done a most creditable job of adapting some of the original Sherlock Holmes radio broadcasts featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. His "novelizations" of the radio scripts stay true to Conan Doyle's style, to Watson's literary efforts in his role as Holmes' "publicist" and to Holmes' character and brilliance in the resolution of his cases. Three stories of particular note stood out in the collection - Holmes' first encounter with Moriarty in THE APRIL FOOL'S ADVENTURE; Holmes' acquisition of his Sussex bee farm retirement property in THE ADVENTURE OF THE OUT-OF-DATE MURDER and a most amusing locked room mystery that Holmes cleverly solves in THE CASE OF THE GIRL WITH THE GAZELLE. It would be difficult to imagine that any fan of Sherlock Holmes would be disappointed with THE LOST ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

I went into this book with high hopes, based in part on the number of four star reviews on the Amazon site, and in equal part because I had so enjoyed THE CASEBOOK OF GREGORY HOOD, the brand new collection of 40s radio scripts by the same team responsible for the original stories that Ken Greenwald adapted here (Denis Green and Anthony Boucher). But oh my, is this book a disappointment! Well, I suppose these stories bear the same relationship to the Green-Boucher scripts that those lousy Charles Osborne adaptations of Agatha Christie's plays do to Christie's plays themselves. In other words, the script can be great, but beware a hack making it into a prose narrative, and that unfortunately is what has happened here.

Why all the good reviews? Reading closer, I can see that half of the goodwill this book garnished must be due to the esteem people have for the original broadcasts with Basil rathbone and Nigel Bruce. But their star presences are nowhere to be seen in this doggerel. You can barely make out what might have been a good plot, because author Greenwald is so incompetent. Yes, there are one or two exceptions ("The Adventure of the Iron Box" has some genuine bafflers in it), but Greenwald isn't even good at grammar: the Iron Box story begins, "My old friend Sir Walter Dunbar had asked Holmes and I to spend a few days with him." Well, maybe the locution "Holmes and I" sounded more British to him. I know Boucher and Green committed so such solecism. And how about a journey to "Gretney Green"? Yeah, that sounds like a place.

But even the plots that we can glimpse through the veil of Greenwald aren't very interesting. "The Girl with the Gazelle" is like a warmed-over Irene Adler story. "The Case of the Amateur Mendicants" is like "The Red Headed League" shaken up with the fizz removed. In most of the stories, as soon as we find out what the crime is, we know instantly the identity of the criminal.

People who admire these stories must either not be reading them, or else they have a high tolerance for badly-written fan fiction. I'll read anything set on Baker Street myself, but Archons of Athens, I thought I'd pass out while reading the "Notorious Canary Trainer" and "The Camberwell Poisoners," That's how dismal they are. The period-style illustrations bring a needed charm and intrigue to the book, so 2 stars.