Read for you by Rick Reiman. This excellent addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon contains many of the aspects that delight his readers. It is set in a macabre and romantic setting, the moors of Cornwall; it has Holmes pitting himself against the common feeling that there must be something supernatural afoot. These traces of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” are not all that recommend it. People go from normal to mad in a matter of minutes. The villain of the story wastes Holmes’s time with an attempted diversion that the detective must dispose of through his amazing talent for ratiocination. The story is slyly autobiographical as well, because Doyle has Holmes attempt a possibly-fatal experiment that Doyle himself had practiced at the risk of his own life. In this story, Holmes and Watson come as close as they ever do to calling each other by their first names. This was a conceit that the Granada TV series (1984-1994) employed when it had Holmes cry out to Watson, “John!”
From “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” (1910)
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