Nonfiction
Sherlock Holmes: The Lost Radio Scripts

by Leslie Charteris
Purview Press, November 2017, $25.98

Sherlockians and old radio buffs will want this volume, presenting 12 scripts from the 1944-45 season of the Holmes radio series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, unheard and unpublished since their initial broadcast, complete right down to the Petri Wine commercials. The writers were Saint creator Leslie Charteris (using the pseudonym Bruce Taylor) and actor Denis Green. The secondary value lies in Dickerson’s compact eight-page introductory chapter, which offers brief biographies of Rathbone and Bruce, history of earlier American broadcasts of the Holmes stories, and an account of getting this version on the air, starting with pioneering scripter Edith Meiser, whose career as a Broadway actress interrupted her Sherlockian efforts. Apparently Green was good at dialogue but hopeless at story structure. Thus, in Ellery Queen terms, Charteris was the Fred Dannay equivalent (outlining the story) while Green took the Manfred Lee role (putting it in finished form). Presumably Anthony Boucher, who later became Green’s collaborator on the Holmes programs, had the same arrangement: he would later take over the Dannay role on the Queen radio show. Notes on the individual scripts identify their contractually required origins in canonical stories (“based on an incident in…,” sometimes a stretch.)

Jon L. Breen
Teri Duerr
5974
Charteris
November 2017
sherlock-holmes-the-lost-radio-scripts
25.98
Purview Press