NE has to feel a healthy respect for writers of the Sherlock Holmes radio plays. On one hand, if you adapt a story from the Canon, you have plenty of Holmes fans who not only know the story, but have certain expectations of plot, charactisation, and so forth. With a mere twenty-odd minutes, this can be difficult enough. On the other hand, if you choose to create your own plot from scratch, the pressure is on to create a story that’s comparable to those of the Canon (which, granted, is not so great if one chooses The Mazarin Stone as a reference).

This is to say nothing of certain limitations of an audio-only medium, including what I can only refer to as the “Dear Lord, Holmes! He’s got a gun!” challenge: how does one create a visual experience with only dialogue and sound effects? Thankfully, the benefits help offset the difficulties. After all, one doesn’t need a huge budget to recreate, say, the Grimpen Mire and the ancient relics of civilisation upon the moors, but rather a good imagination and a small trunk of sound props.

Today’s Old Time Radio show is a good example of how Boucher and Green took one of the “unpublished” cases of Holmes and turned it into an interesting episode with the help of some clever writing and effects. It’s not perfect, by any means, but if you pay careful attention to how the characters, setting and plot are contructed, you can learn a lot about how things were done in the golden age of radio. There are also a few winks to Sherlockians and fans of detective literature, including Dr. Thorndyke.

Download: The Notorious Canary Trainer, episode 176 from Mutual’s The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, original aired 1945/04/23, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. (See the Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Log of the series.)