begins with Briggs’s own adaptation of The Final Problem and The Empty House, featuring Alan Cox—a former Watson in Barry Levinson’s 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes—as Professor Moriarty. I visited the studios during the recording of another Conan Doyle classic, The Hound of the Baskervilles. “So many people remember The Hound of the Baskervilles because it kind of has a monster in it,” Briggs tells me. “And it’s a great title, isn’t it?” For this production, he has assembled a reliable, highly professional cast he can rely upon to convey the authentic Holmesian atmosphere in a relatively brisk recording session. “I’ve got together a bunch of actors I know can do it this way, more or less continually recording. I think Richard Dinnock has done a really good job of adapting it. All the major plot points are there, we all have our little favourite bits, and there are a couple of things that aren’t in there. But the plot is all there, and it rockets along.” Briggs is no stranger to The Hound either, having adapted it for the stage some years earlier, with Samuel Clemens (son of Holmes and the Ripper author Brian) as Sir Henry Baskerville, a role he recreates in this audio version. “It was about Watson putting a play on,” Briggs recalls, “to which he’d invited Holmes to last rehearsals, and wanted Holmes to play Holmes, to see if it was all authentic. So I brought Holmes back on during the long period when Watson was in Devonshire, and have him ask awkward questions about the plot: ‘If you were supposed to be looking after Sir Henry Baskerville, why did you go off to the postmaster?’ For the Big Finish production, many of those awkward questions are avoided by the simple act of removing the final explanatory scene in Baker Street. “When you get to the end and the Hound’s been killed, and you think, more or less, that Stapleton’s gone, and Beryl has been treated so badly and Sir Henry is a mess, it feels fulfilling and that it’s the end of the story. You don’t miss that explanation in dramatic terms.”
But this second series is not made up entirely of Canonical adaptations. Coming in between the Moriarty saga and The Hound is The Reification of Hans Gerber. “It’s an entirely original script that I asked George Mann to do,” says Briggs. “George has written lots of stuff for the Black Library, and he’s very good at Victorian pastiche. He put himself forward very early on, and suggested a story which I liked, which had an interesting twist. He’s written something very much in the style of Conan Doyle, and very much in the style of all of them in this little series—there’s a lot of Watson’s voice.”
Rounding off the second series is a dramatisation of David Stuart Davies’s 1992 novel The Tangled Skein, which sees the most famous fictional detective of all time battling the most famous vampire, Count Dracula. The adaptation is again by Richard Dinnock, and its placement immediately after The Hound is entirely intentional, for Skein serves as a semi-sequel to the Conan Doyle classic. It would be unfair to those unfamiliar with Davies’s novel to go into further details here—instead, I advise you to purchase them both. Dealing as it does with an undead adversary, we are going further into the realm of the fantastic than usual. Has Briggs ever considered an encounter between Holmes and the Doctor? “I was never tempted to do that, not at all. In Doctor Who, everything else we know of as fictional is fictional. So in the world of Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes is fictional. It might be a difficult one. It’s not a priority for me to do that.”
And what does the future hold for Sherlock Holmes in the very capable hands of Mr Briggs? “I want to see what our audience likes best. I would like to carry on doing a mixture of adaptations and original stuff as well, getting other writers to come up with entirely new Holmes stories which feel like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” For the time being, though, the masterly first series of adventures can be obtained by visiting www.bigfinish.com.
CARTOON, by Andrew Toos
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