Elementary

“My name is Sherlock Holmes.  It is my business to know what other people do not know.” (“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”) You’d be hard pressed to find a more famous detective (any literary character, for that matter) more famous and known throughout the world than Sherlock Holmes.  Since the character’s introduction in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, his adventures have been reprinted around the globe; he has starred in films and television shows (indeed, at the time of this writing, there are two different shows that cast Holmes in the modern world and a third installment of a blockbuster film franchise starring the detective is in the works).  But the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his legendary consulting detective enjoyed a long life on radio and was a fixture during the World War II era as he simultaneously entertained audiences on the big screen. And his patron saint on the airwaves was an actress, singer, and writer named Edith Meiser.  Meiser had grown up reading the Conan Doyle stories, and she believed Sherlock Holmes’ adventures were a natural for radio.  She worked tirelessly to bring the stories to radio, and she succeeded in 1930 when her adaptation of “The Speckled Band” premiered on NBC on October 20.  William Gillette, who wrote and starred in a stage adaptation of Holmes, played Holmes in that first broadcast.  The series, which starred Richard Gordon, Louis Hector, and eventually Richard Gordon again, ran on NBC until 1936.  Through these different actors and series, Meiser remained a consistent hand at the wheel Holmes returned to the air following the success of the 1939 film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles.  NBC commissioned a new series to be written by Mesier and to star the actors from the film - Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson.  This series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, premiered on NBC on October 2, 1939.  It ran until March 1, 1942, when it moved to the Mutual Network.  Most of the episodes were original adventures “suggested by” incidents in the original Conan Doyle stories.  When Meiser left the series in 1944, scripts were provided initially by Leslie Charteris (creator of “The Saint”) and Dennis Green.  When Charteris left to focus on bringing his own creation to radio, Anthony Boucher stepped in and co-wrote the series with Green. Rathbone, concerned about typecasting, left the role in 1946 after the final film in their series was released.  Nigel Bruce had no such concerns, and he stayed on in the part as producers brought in a new Holmes - actor Tom Conway.  As the veteran of the cast, Bruce received top billing for the 1946 - 1947 series, sponsored by Kremel Hair Tonic.  The Conway/Bruce series lasted 39 episodes before both actors left at the end of the season.  Rathbone’s departure coincided with Meiser’s return; many of her earlier scripts were re-used for Tom Conway and Nigel Bruce. The show came back for the 1947 - 1948 season with new actors at the microphones.  Alfred Shirley assumed the narration/sidekick duties as Dr. Watson, and John Stanley took over as Sherlock Holmes.  When some listeners heard Stanley in the role, they suspected one of Holmes’ famous disguises might be in use.  As Edith Meiser recalled, “Everyone thought that Basil Rathbone, who had said he would have nothing more to do with Sherlock Holmes, was now moonlighting as ‘John Stanley.’”  Stanley, she said, “was a darling who sounded exactly like Basil Rathbone.”  To this writer’s ears, Stanley outdoes his predecessors and emerges as the definitive radio Holmes.  His performances are far more polished than Rathbone’s, and Stanley is unencumbered by any of the baggage (such as frustration with the role) that Rathbone brought with him to the program.  Stanley was also admired by Holmes fans; he wrote a monograph on the pistols used by Holmes and Watson that appeared in the July 1948 issue of Black Maskmagazine.  And both he and Alfred Shirley were given wonderful lines by Edith Meiser. Unfortunately, this season of Sherlock Holmes proved to be Meiser’s last.  She was fired for, as she put it, refusing to put more violence into her scripts.  “The producers were always telling me to make Mr. Holmes more hardboiled,” she’d recall years later.  The show continued on without her, with a decidedly more modern feel to Holmes than what had come earlier, before leaving the airwaves in 1950.  John Stanley left the role in 1949 and he was followed by Ben Wright (later to star as an intrepid Scotland Yard inspector on Pursuit) before the airwaves in 1950. Holmes and Watson continued their radio adventures across the pond after they wrapped up on American radio.  John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson starred in an excellent series of Conan Doyle adaptations in 1955.  Co-produced by ABC, the series featured Orson Welles as Professor Moriarty in an adaptation of “The Final Problem.”  And of course, the character is still going strong on television (Sherlock and Elementary, which recast the sleuth in the modern world, draw millions of viewers) and in films (Robert Downey Jr.’s re-imagined take on the character has become a box office smash franchise).  But few of the writers who have adapted the character since his creation have been able to match Conan Doyle’s style in the way Edith Meiser pulled it off.  Thanks in no small part to her work, the Sherlock Holmes radio adventures are a must-listen for Sherlockians and fans of radio drama alike.