This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives, a collection of ghostbreaker mysteries by G. W. Thomas. Meet Dr. Drayk who solves a weird mystery from Canada. Here are Richard Delamare and his Watson, Bainbridge in four occult tales filled with terror and laughter. We also get The Athenodorians, a secret organization of sleuths led by Baron von Klarnstein, who lives in Wellman House in New England. His daughter Orestia is not so housebound, flying around the United States in a bi-plane to wield her sword in the interests of the human race. They solve “The Case of Phantom Legion” as well as “The Case of the Blue Man”. This collection is guaranteed to thrill Horror and Mystery fans alike. Check out the companion volume, Strange Adventures.
Audio books are very popular these days, in fact, have been for ages. I remember listening to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on audio tape in the 1980s. And even earlier, William Shatner reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” on LP back in the 1970s. And it was always about the voice. Certain actors simply go well with certain authors. I mean who better than Christopher Lee to read Edgar Allan Poe? How about Basil Rathbone? Or Vincent Price? The good people at Librox do what they can, but if the voice is dull, annoying or simply flat, then forget it. Even the Virtual Voice Audios we offer don’t quite do it for me. (We decided to do them because we had people with reading disabilities who really wanted to listen to our books.)
The actors who read these selections are all associated with the Holmes canon in one way or another. They are narrators people expect to hear, lending their distinctive voices to Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal prose. Of course all these voices are British and male. I could handle Vincent Price reading Conan Doyle but few other Americans. The accent is part of the package. (Charlton Heston (American) and Matt Frewer (Canadian) need not apply.)
Peter Cushing (1913-1994)
Peter Cushing, who these days seems to be best remembered as the Grand Moff Tarkin, played Sherlock for TV in 1965. His Watson was Nigel Stock.
Christopher Lee (1922-2015)
Christopher Lee can claim to have played Holmes as well as other characters including Mycroft Holmes (1970) and Henry Baskerville (1959), an early team-up with Peter Cushing. His last Holmsian outing had him playing Sherlock next to Patrick McNee’s Watson for “Golden Years” (1991-1992). These days he is either Count Dooku or the wizard Saruman.
Derek Jacobi (1938-)
Derek Jacobi will always be known for his portrayal of the lead in I, Claudius. But he did play a detective once, William Le Queux’s Duckworth Drew in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971-1973).
Stephen Fry (1957-)
Stephen Fry is perhaps the most famous audio book reader of them all, having done The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, P. G. Wodehouse, Paddington the Bear and the Harry Potter books. He also did Sherlock Holmes The Definite Collection. He played Sherlock’s smarter brother in the Guy Ritchie films with Robert Downey Jr.
Conclusion
If you don’t need a famous voice I can also recommend Simon Stanhope, Greg Wagland and David Clarke for decent versions of the tales. I couldn’t find any Jeremy Brett (very sad) but you can hear Stephen Fry talk about Brett here. If you really must have some Benedict Cumberatch, he does new stories by John Taylor. I stuck to the originals mostly because I’m a Sherlock snob. There are a million new adventures (each of the quality of instant coffee) but I have been uninterested since the days of Solar Pons. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes intrigued me, because they are original in their own way except for trying to fill the void ACD left after the Reichenbach Falls. Most fail but the effort is appreciated.
As for Sherlock pastiche, I will stick to Fred Saberhagen and his The Holmes-Dracula File (1978), probably the best Sherlock mash-up ever written (though Manly Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds (1975) is also good. As you can see from my Strange Detectives (and my article on Sherlock as ghostbreaker) I prefer the quasi-Horror elements anyway. Writers like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu also fascinate me since they wrote proto-detective fiction as well as ghost stories. Those early days when everything wasn’t “Oh, look there’s a bishop on the landing!” and the Mystery and Horror elements were both evident (like in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”). That’s the sweet spot.
Check out the Wild Inc. Super-saga…
Leave a Reply