Sherlock Holmes and his Adventures on American Radio

It’s been over a hundred and twenty-five years since the adventures of Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print and captivated a generation of readers. Subsequent generations have enjoyed, adapted and expanded on his adventures leading him to become perhaps the most enduring character in fiction. That long run has been helped by his adventures in a variety of media, most notably film and television. But what about radio? Holmes has had a long career in radio on both sides of the Atlantic, indeed the radio adventures of Sherlock Holmes are almost as old as radio itself. He debuted on air in 1922 and just a few years later Holmes and Watson were featuring in a regular weekly series on NBC in the USA. That series ended in 1936 but when Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made the first of their career-defining fourteen films as Holmes and Watson there was a certain inevitability about Holmes’ return to the American airwaves. The subsequent series ran for seven years and almost two hundred and twenty half hour radio shows. When Rathbone quit the role—in both radio and film – the show limped on for a few years. This book tells the story of those shows.