NE NEEDS NOT BE VERY ASTUTE to realise that this blog hasn’t been updated for quite a while. The reason has to do with another new web project, one also dealing with Sherlock Holmes, which will far surpass the meagre resources and writing within this site. More details to come as we get nearer to launch.

AM ALWAYS HAPPY TO SUPPORT THE ARTS, and especially any well-regarded play in Canada that also appeals to Holmes fans. At the Diesel Playhouse is running an award-winning play called Antoine Feval:

Meet Barnaby Gibbs: an incurable optimist, Sherlock Holmes fan, and a man who knows he’s not particularly good at anything. One night, while checking on a friend’s empty house, he encounters a stranger, dressed entirely in black, holding a bag full of stolen belongings and attempting to write a poem about sapphires. There is only one conclusion a reasonable man could come to: this is the notorious cat burglar / con-man known as the Rhyming Bandit! However, Barnaby is not a reasonable man, and when the stranger explains he is actually the famous detective Antoine Feval, a new crime-fighting duo is born.

The comedy is running in Toronto from the 15th to the 25th of this month. More information is available at the Diesel Playhouse. Next up are runs in New Zealand and New Mexico.

HEN I FIRST HEARD THE NAME OF SOLAR PONS, some ten years ago, at first I mentally grouped him with the other (often badly written) parodies like Hemlock Sholmes. A huge disservice, I realised soon thereafter, for Solar Pons is one of the few pastiche series that can actually come close to those of ACD’s original creations. In fact, this detective has quite a few fans of his own, the most enthusiastic of which is undoubtedly Bob Byrne, whose true labour of love, the website SolarPons.com, along with his sumptuously written and illustrated Solar Pons Gazette, is a veritable monument to August Derleth’s creation.

I’ve asked Bob to write a short introduction to Solar Pons for us, and he has graced us with the following….

Solar Pons?

Who is that? The Sherlock Holmes reader is painfully aware of how many stories featuring the world’s first consulting detective are available. While many are of admirable quality, many, many more are not. But one suspects that the Master himself would flash that wry
smile in acknowledging that the finest pastiches feature a detective not named Holmes! Young August Derleth, disappointed to learn that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would not be writing any additional Holmes tales, took it upon himself to continue the tradition of the great detective. Thus was created Solar Pons, ‘The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street.’

Solar Pons and his trustworthy companion, Doctor Parker, reside at 7B Praed Street, taken care of by their long-suffering landlady, Mrs. Johnson. Of the multitude to follow in the footsteps of Sir Arthur, none as faithfully evoke the images of the dynamic duo from Baker Street. The spirit of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson lives on in the tales of August Derleth.

www.SolarPons.com is the first website dedicated solely to the adventures of Solar Pons. The Holmes fan that has not yet discovered these stories is likely in for a treat.

If you haven’t yet seen it, count on spending an entertaining hour or so browsing through his lavish Solar Pons Gazette, of which I’m told there is a short Christmas issue forthcoming, to be followed by another large edition next year.

R. IAN VISSER OF TORONTO, ONTARIO, is in the enviable position (well, at least from my perspective) of having access to the vast archives of the Toronto Star, in which he has found numerous pieces on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes going back more than a century, including some intriguing advertisements of the time featuring the Great Detective. Mr. Visser has been kind enough to send a few of these to me, with plenty more to come. As I receive them, I’ll clean them up and post them here, transcribing the contents when the quality makes them difficult to read.

Here is the first article, which covers a Canadian lecture by ACD, and which appeared in the Toronto Star on November 24th, 1897. It is transcribed below, and you can also download an image of the article, or a PDF of the full page.

An Author’s Life

Dr. A. Conan Doyle Sketches His Own Career.
Tells of the Creation of Sherlock Holmes.
An Interesting Lecture by an Interesting Man.

Dr. Conan Doyle gained success from writing a department of literature in which his heart never was. He said last night in his lecture at Massey [?] Music Hall that Sherlock Holmes was dead, and that he would not be resurrected.

It is the historical novel, with its gay, bright pictures of chivalry and deeds of daring like those in which Scott won his fame that the worthy author longs for and will make his future work.

Dr. Doyle says that he is not Sherlock Holmes. He claims no superiority as a detective. He says that he has been deluged with letters requesting him to attempt to solve mysterious [sic] but that he has never undertaken any case. He says he is not a sharp man, and that he only in writing puts himself in the position of a shrewd man and imagines what the shrewd man would do.

“It is rather embarrassing to speak about one’s self,” said Dr. Doyle when he began his address. “I would prefer to talk about some other author’s work, but I suppose all are interested in me on account of what I have written.”

Dr. Doyle is a giant in size. He looks to be about six feet four and is not at all slim. His style of lecturing is not at all attractive, and it was believed that had he chosen any other subject, as he said he had wished, that he would not have been so entertaining.

He stood all the evening behind a high desk, and spoke from a carefully prepared manuscript. The audience was a Sherlock Holmes-Conan Doyle one, and every one present listened intently to all that was said.

The lecture was an autobiographical sketch. It began with early reminiscences, when in childhood he met and sat on the knee of William Makapiece Thackeray. He hold of his first short story, written at the age of six, of his entrance into literary work and his short story writing.

When he came to tell of Sherlock Holmes he read some short sketches from the memoirs and adventures of the far-famed detective.

He told of his historical novels, of the writing of “Micah Clarke,” “The White Company,” “The Great Shadow” and “The Refugees.”

Of the last he spoke most probably because it was based on a Canadian subject. He said that his work in that had been a labor of love, for he had attempted to join together whatever interested two factions of the English-speaking race, whose common language had oftentimes been used only for libel and mutual reproach.

The program was completed by a reading from an unpublished piece, “The Lord of Chateau Noir,” which is one of the strongest extracts of all his works.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to Mr. Visser for taking the time and effort to make these articles available to us.

ver at the Baker Street Blog (my favourite daily reading), Scott reflects on the growth of this collection, which seems to be an occupational hazard among Sherlockians –myself included, much to the chagrin of my wife– and points to a brief but useful article for beginners over at AbeBooks: Clues on Collecting Sherlock Holmes.

Clues on Collecting Sherlock Holmes
by Phillip Gold, ABAA
221Books, Westlake Village, CA, USA

Phillip Gold, who has selected this issue’s Pick of the Month, shares some elementary tips on how to collect books featuring the famous detective.

Assembling a collection of cornerstone titles will be a challenging, and perhaps a lifelong endeavor. But don’t fail to inject some of your own interests and perspectives into the process. That’s the secret to assembling a unique and significant collection. Books about the world’s first consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have been a consistently popular collecting genre since the appearance of A Scandal in Bohemia in The Strand Magazine in July 1891.

(Via the Baker Street Journal blog.)

Those wanting to find an online version of the famous “Shaw 100″ can find it within the doors of The Diogenes Club, as well as within the social book-cataloguing club LibaryThing.

HIS PARODY IS A REAL ENIGMA. It was originally sent to me a several years ago from a friend who claimed he had heard it on a local radio station in Ohio, many years before. It occasionally winds up in CD-ROM collections of OTR shows, but with little or no attribution except its name, “Sherlock Holmes, 1965″, and the company that apparently produced it, Midnight Productions.

It’s difficult to deduce much about its origins. As as educated guess, I’d certainly say it was an American production –the jarring accents certainly give that away– and it was produced by an amateur-grade production company with decent studio access. The sound is clear, and while the show does have a few funny lines and situations, it’s far from top quality writing or acting. No web searches, ranging from Google to eBay to copyright databases, I’ve done have led me to any further information about the recording, nor the production company, which leads me to believe it is probably defunct. As for dating this, it does appear to be a recording from the sixties or seventies, but most shows produced from the late sixties to the early eighties do have a certain “sound” that is indicative of the equipment and effects common across that time period. Owing to the obvious, most people just assume the production date of this is 1965.

At any rate, this is a rare play that does have an interesting premise (pre- Austin Powers), wherein the very aged Holmes and Watson go searching for a new case in the mid-sixties. The jokes are no funnier nor worse than most other parodies, and so should fit nicely into the library of most Sherlockians who collect such things.

Download: Sherlock Holmes, 1965, by Midnight Productions

If you do know anything more about his recording, I’d love to hear from you.

NE OF THE GREATEST “FEUDS” OF OLD TIME RADIO was that between Jack Benny and Fred Allen, resulting in constant comedic jabs at each other on their respective shows for nearly a decade. Fans of the shows were often completely convinced that the two harboured deep resentment for each other, but the truth was far less interesting: they were the best of friends, and played up on the feud to get laughs, and –when one was guesting on the other’s show– would even pass along the best gags of the night to the “rival.”

Allen himself was quite a sharp wit, and was frequently embattled by the censors because of his political and social commentary, often ad-libbed to cover flubs in the program. (Most shows had to be carefully scripted before being approved by the overly nit-picky network censors.) Although his shows don’t today carry the timelessness of Benny’s, it’s usually because his references to American and world events were more frequent, and barely covered by a thin veneer of satire, unfortunately lost on most modern audiences.

Since we profiled a show of Benny as Sherlock, it seems only fitting that we offer his rival as yet another incarnation of the sleuth, this one named Fetlock Bones. This episode of the Texaco Star Theater certainly falls under the zany madcap category. (Those wanting to skip ahead to the parody can find it around the 18 minute mark, but will miss part of the set-up.)

Download: Texaco Star Theater - Fetlock Bones with Fred Allen, originally aired April 9th, 1944 (6.4 MB)

NE OF THE MOST BELOVED and long-lived of Old Time Radio performers was the incomparable Jack Benny. Among the thousands of other, often dismally-written, shows polluting the airwaves, audiences always knew that they could tune into Benny and lose themselves in the comedian’s sharp wit, his knack with timing, his many foibles (especially his propensity for clinging to his pennies), the memorable plots, and the more outré gags that slipped under the radar of the censors and his sponsors. (After all, words on paper often take on a whole new meaning when performed.)

Benny was also known for his trenchant parodies, often far more entertaining than the pieces he spoofed, and so, when the much-lauded Rathbone/Bruce film The Hound of the Baskervilles was filling the theatres in 1939, an obvious target was the master detective himself.

While I wouldn’t consider this a rare recording among OTR fans, it’s one that several Sherlockians of my Internet acquaintance haven’t yet heard. And, as always, Benny delivers where lesser comedic characters like Miss Sherlock fall flat on their deerstalkers.

Download: Jack Benny - The Hound of the Baskervilles, originally aired June 11, 1939 (6.6 MB)

ERE’S A RECORDING that I’ve seen on several (supposedly) public domain archives, as well as some DVDs of public domain Holmes films, so I’m assuming that this file may be freely shared. I consider it one of the treasures of my collection: seven and a half minutes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaking about the origins of Sherlock Holmes and his dedication to Spiritualism. The date ascribed to this file is 1930, which is the year of his death. Although I’m told second-hand that this recording may be found in the British Museum archives (along with a couple more), it is the only recording I think I have of his voice.

Download: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaking, 1930 (2.7 MB)

If anybody has any more information on this file, or any more recordings of ACD that you wouldn’t mind sharing, I’d love to hear from you.

HESE PAST FEW WEEKS, I’ve been wrestling with the age-old question, “How does one fit 20 boxes of books, three bookshelves, an audio/video suite, a large air exchanger, a men’s mountain bike, and a medieval arsenal into an office measuring 8 ft by 8 ft?” The teeter piles threatening to engulf me (and possibly impale me) any moment require my next posts to possess a certain urgency….

This next week, I’m doing something a little different on this blog. While my dead-tree Sherlockian library pales by most (just two of the aforementioned bookshelves), I do have quite a hefty audio library, mostly digital nowadays. I have to re-catalogue my collection fairly soon, but my recordings –including radio plays, audio books, interviews, and the like– number well over a thousand. For the next few days, I’m going to provide downloads of some of the more rare and unusual files, along with short introductions and source notes, whenever possible.

First, a note about copyrights. Most collectors of Old Time Radio shows (known simply as OTR) follow a general rule of thumb: shows publicly aired before 1978 are generally considered to be in the public domain, especially in the United States, as there was no copyright protection issued for such broadcasts under the then-extant copyright laws of 1909. The Berne Convention, which took effect January 1, 1978, officially accorded these rights to radio broadcasts, and retroactively accorded certain limited rights to recordings made within the five years previous, but only if official application was made, which was very rare. (It was not possible to make works in the public domain copyrighted ex-post-facto.) Now, I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, so I’m walking this well-worn path, which is allegedly in accord with the staff of the U.S. Library of Congress. (For more information about OTR copyrights, please see the information on the RadioLovers.com copyright page.) Many other recordings (that weren’t publicly broadcast) have fallen into the public domain because there was never an application for copyright, the copyright has expired, or the copyright was never renewed. If you or your organisation have any copyright claim to the materials I present here, please contact me and I’ll rectify the situation and give due notice.

Whew.

Today, we have a true rarity, and what’s more, a blazing example of terrible OTR. It took me a few years to find the two episodes I know to exist, and once I finally found them, I chalked the effort up to completionist obsession. Wrote the radio expert Jack French, in an essay on Lady Crimefighters:

During World War II no more women sleuths arrived on the scene but 1946 was a banner year when three new ones debuted on network radio. One was as much comedienne as crime solver, Meet Miss Sherlock. This was a CBS summer sustainer that recounted the adventures of Jane Sherlock, a scatterbrained amateur detective, and her boyfriend, Peter Blossom, a civil attorney who occasionally fainted.

There were two separate versions of this show; the first ran from July 3, 1946 to September 26, 1946 while the second one ran from Sept 28, 1947 to Oct 26, 1947. Both series were produced and directed by David Vaile, with scripts by E. Jack Neuman and Don Thompson. The announcer was Murray Wagner and the live orchestra was headed by Milton Charles. Sondra Gair had the title lead in the 1946 version, Captain Dingle of the NYPD was a youthful Bill Conrad and Joe Petruzzi played Peter Blossom.

When the series resumed in the fall of 1947, Betty Moran did the first epiosde but her voice was not “dithery” enough so Monty Margetts was brought in and she played the lead until it went off the air two months later. Barney Phillips was the voice of Captain Dingle. This series was more comedy than adventure, although crimes were eventually solved. Only two episodes have survived; both feature Gair in the 1946 version.

The scripts are insipid, the acting mundane, the jokes lousy, and the political incorrectness worthy of a good burning in effigy. Still, I did promise you some unusual recordings. I promise that tomorrow’s entry will be less likely to affront your sensibilities. (It shouldn’t be that difficult.)

Download: Meet Miss Sherlock - Case of the Deadman’s Chest (MP3, 6.9 MB), originally aired July 7th, 1946

ONAN DOYLE WAS NO STRANGER to controversy, and in fact seemed to enjoy churning up his fair share every now and then. For example, he was a prolific letter-writer to the papers, he publically challenged what he saw as miscarriages of justice, and his latter-day lectures and articles on fairies and Spiritualism, replete with sensational photographic “evidence,” were obviously meant to stir his audiences to action. However, there were several controversies attaching themselves to him which weren’t of his own accord. Case in point: the Piltdown Man, one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century.

It was a tumultuous time in the scientific world. The turn of the century brought with it a questioning of the established theories in almost every area of science. Medical researchers were delving into the true causes of diseases, physicists were plumbing the origins of matter, astronomers were shaping a new view of the cosmos, and biologists were hotly debating Darwin’s theory of Evolution, often finding themselves at odds with religious institutions, funders, and the fervoured opinions expounded daily in the papers. The one argument that continually broke apart the so-called scientific proof of the Evolutionists was the absence of the evolutionary bridge between the lesser primates and mankind, the Missing Link.

And then, in 1912, it was found.

The specimen, dubbed The Piltdown Man, caused an immediate sensation, providing seemingly verifiable evidence of Darwin’s theories. Science yet again asserted its superiority over religion and superstition, and the Piltdown Man became a rallying point for the much-berated scientific community. Unfortunately, it was eventually found to be a fraud. Scotsman.com presents an article entitled Conan Doyle and the hoax of the 20th century:

Forty years later when JS Weiner discovered that this so-called Piltdown Man was a fake made out of a 500-year-old skull and an orang-utan jawbone, the hunt began to find out who had perpetrated the fraud.

The main suspect has always been Dawson, possibly with the aid of his colleagues Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who had also assisted at the dig. But there is someone else in the frame. According to one theory this man had the means, motive and opportunity. He is none other than the Scottish creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I wish to draw your careful attention to the first comment, left by author Doug Elliott, who produced what I’m told is a remarkable book called The Curious Incident of the Missing Link. It apparently does an excellent job at debunking the claims that Sir Arthur was involved in this hoax.

For more information about the Piltdown hoax, see the Wikipedia entry and the many links at its page bottom, including the Piltdown Plot site.

N AN ARTICLE IDEALLY WRITTEN for newcomers to the Sherlockian mythos, the Crime Library site presents All about Sherlock Holmes by Anthony Bruno:

Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and presented through the narration of the fictional Dr. Watson, Holmes is the most brilliant detective ever. His powers of observation seem supernatural until he utters the famous phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” and proceeds to enumerate the logical steps that have brought him to a prescient conclusion. The most innocuous detail can lead Holmes to profound revelations. But where did these amazing powers of deduction originate? Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle make up Sherlock Holmes out of whole cloth, or did he have a model in mind when he created the great detective?

Bruno seems to come at the topic as an outsider, but he has done due diligence with his homework here. The article covers a lot of ground and facts without getting bogged down in scholarly issues of debate, and although it barely skims the surface of Conan Doyle and Sherlockian matters, it may inspire readers to learn more. (Yes, there are a few small factual errors, but I think we can forgive him for those.)