The Detection of Sherlock Holmes written and narrated by Patrick Horgan.
This book, by your narrator Patrick Horgan, is a step by step account of his discovery that Arthur Conan Doyle's great crime, the apparent murder of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, was just a carefully planned hoax. He was famous for enjoying practical jokes, and, as reported in Science 83 by Winslow and Meyer, it is very probable that he was responsible for the still unexplained Piltdown Man Hoax. The diggings were a mere eight miles from Doyle's house, well within the range of doughty Victorian walkers.
The key to the puzzle was the acceptance of the notion that every conundrum, or conansdream" as Joyce put it, and all the little inconsistencies, which have so delighted the Baker Street
Irregulars, were put there for a purpose. They were clues. All the evidence to show that Holmes must survive, and Moriarty must die, is there in plain sight in the books before their great confrontation.
The books after the return are full of help for the poor reader-detectives who failed to spot that they had been had. They just didn't follow the principles of detection laid down by their hero.
After many years of rewrites this book has become a slightly fantastic autobiographical tale which follows up the red herrings until they start to smell odd, and at length latches on to the trail leading to the classical denouement. It might be a good idea to have a copy of the Memoirs at your elbow while listening to this book.
Total time running: 8 hours 53 minutes.
Patrick Horgan began his Sherlockian career playing Captain Gregg in the musical "Baker Street" in 1964, and went on to play Sherlock Holmes in the William Gillette play, and in "The Speckled Band" and in a television commercial, and to play William Gillette (in Kenneth Ludwig's play "Dramatic License"), making him one of the very few actors to have played both Sherlock Holmes and an actor who has played Sherlock Holmes. He also has read the entire Canon for the Library of Congress recordings for the blind, and for Worldtainment Audiobooks, which offers all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and "The Lost World", "The Poison Belt" and "The Leather Funnel", and Horgan's own book of Sherlockian scholarship "The Detection of Sherlock Holmes" on ten CDs.
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Replies
I first met Patrick in the late 60's in Toronto when he was acting in the Gillette play. Years later, we postulated as to who the mysterious man may have been. In all likelihood it was the then owner of 'ABC Books' on Yonge St. this gentleman was, probably, the most knowledgable human on the topic of Sherlock Holmes and James Joyce.
Interestingly, Patrick is nearing the finish of his book on Joyce, of whom he is a recognized authority.
Cheers