member, their sibling Mortimer, had left them affably playing cards, with the only portent of what was to come a brief glimpse by George of an unknown something moving in the bushes outside the dining room window. And soon, the killer strikes again, leaving Mortimer also amongst the dead, on his face the same look of fear that marked his sister, and leading the local vicar to believe his parish is “devil-ridden.” Displaying his typical brilliance, despite the strains to his system, Holmes deduces that Mortimer used the powder of rax pedis diaboli, devil’s foot root, an obscure African plant, burnt in the fireplace, to remove Owen, George and Brenda from the scene. Holmes, less brilliantly, had tried the powder out, with almost fatal consequences for him and his Boswell. When Brenda’s love, Dr. Leon Sterndale, who brought the devil’s foot back with him from his travels, realizes what has happened, he achieves his own form of justice, one that, under the circumstances, Holmes and Watson endorse.
One of the many benefits of being a Sherlockian in 2014 is the easy availability of audio and video adaptations of the Canon that were lost to earlier generations. As a teenager in the 1970s, I found references, in books like Michael Pointer’s The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes, to Arthur Wontner and the Rathbone/Bruce radio series almost as tantalizing as the good doctor’s notorious untold tales. But today, much is accessible, and a recent viewing of the BBC’s first Sherlock Holmes series, starring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock, on DVD, prompted an assessment of how different writers have adapted the Tregennis case.
Eille Norwood played Holmes 47 times on screen in a series of silent films from Stoll Pictures; the second, from 1921 (as part of a series titled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) was “The Devil’s Foot” (hereafter, just Devil). You can find the half-hour adaptation by Googling it; given Norwood’s mark on the role in the era before the talkies, it’s worth the time. The story is, naturally enough, compressed. The first title card sets the stage, with Watson reminding his companion, “Don’t forget, Holmes, you’re down here for a rest. Thank goodness there won’t be any work for you here!” The pair then discover the Tregennises themselves—here all three, not just Brenda, are dead, perhaps because conveying the brothers’s condition from the original—“singing snatches of songs and gibbering like two great apes”—was too hard to pull off in a silent film. There are some other minor changes—it is Holmes, not Watson, who pulls his friend to safety from the idiotic experiment Holmes undertakes to test the poison powder first-hand, but the general contours are included, even the clue of the gravel. The most jarring aspect, for me, was the inappropriate soundtrack, with jaunty music even at scenes of tension, and no segments where the instruments enhanced, rather than detracted from, the tension and suspense. And it’s an uphill battle almost a century later to find a silent drama engaging.
1931 saw the first radio adaptation, starring Richard Gordon and Leigh Lovell, one that I have not yet been able to trace. But the second-oldest, from 1936, with Louis Hector and Harry West as Holmes and Watson, was easily locatable online. It’s hard to tell if audio degradations over time have taken their toll, but the voices are an obstacle to engagement. Hector, in particular, sounds more like W.C. Fields to my ear than John Gielgud. This version opens traditionally, with Watson setting the stage—Holmes’s breakdown—before providing a word picture of the gloomy setting for their retreat from London. Perhaps guilding the lily a bit, the radio play’s writer has Holmes point out that the treacherous bay called Mounts Bay in the Canon is known by the locals as “the Devil’s Cauldron,” and that the region was rumored to have been a center for satanic worship. The “strange monuments of stone” from the original are turned into remnants of a temple to the Dark One, who fled into the bay after its destruction, and whose “hoof-beats” could still be heard on moonless nights. The additions can’t help put me in mind of the cinematic legend that a version of The Taming of Shrew was credited to Shakespeare with “additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” Doyle’s more subtle descriptions are far more effective. Another problem is the climactic experiment scene, with Watson, instead of being possessed by a “freezing horror,” narrating what he sees as if a play-by-play announcer, in what would seem to be an inevitable challenge for any audio adaptation. The adapter also has Sterndale identify the killer of his love to Holmes, who reacts, surprisingly, with surprise—when you eliminate one of two viable suspects, whomever remains, however probable, must be the guilty party. (See below for why Holmes should have regarded Sterndale as a suspect in all three Tregennis deaths).
Next to tackle the Tregennis case was the Sherlock Holmes for generations.
Basil Rathbone, in a radio play costarring Nigel Bruce as the lovable if unCanonical bumbler of a Watson. Sadly, I was not able to track down a recording, but surely Rathbone’s iconic Holmes voice, with its air of superiority, made it a memorable one; and the other scripts for the long-running series adapted from the Canonical 60 took relatively few liberties. After Rathbone tired of the role, Bruce partnered with Tom Conway on the radio, and in 1947, the pair tackled Devil.
Conway does an excellent Rathbone, and by extension, an excellent Holmes. The script has some elements in common with the Hector version, e.g., the Devil’s Cauldron, not too surprising with Edith Meiser at work on both series, and lifts whole sections intact from the 1936 version. Its Sterndale is only a neighbor of the Tregennis family, not a relative. Just two years later, Devil was again on the air, with John Stanley and Alfred Shirley in the leads. Like Conway, Stanley’s rendition of the Master owed a lot to Rathbone’s. The episode used a standard series device—presenting as prologue a climactic scene—here Holmes and Watson racing up some stairs in response to maniacal laughter by a man chanting “The Devil’s Foot! The Devil’s Foot!” After the sponsor’s message, the listener actually hears all the Tregennis family in life, playing cards, and the scene includes Mortimer’s reported observation of a lurking thing; hearing this first-hand makes more of an impact—the victims are characters the listener has encountered, and there’s no reason at that stage—pre-horror—to be skeptical of Mortimer’s account. That choice illustrates the range of options a creative adaptor has to enhance a Holmes story for the ear; for example, Bert Coules brilliantly opened his “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” with the murder already having occurred.
Unsurprisingly, Sherlockian Michael Hardwick’s 1962 radio play was the most faithful to date, in keeping with the overall approach of the series featuring Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley. Unlike the other radio productions mentioned above, Watson’s chilling depiction of the ill-conceived experiment was conveyed directly, with Shelley more than capable of evoking the terror his character felt at the horrific effects of the drug on his mind. And this productions’s Mortimer actually comes across as a sympathetic victim at the outset, which better sets up the eventual reveal of his villainy. Hardwick’s choice in making minimal changes to the text is validated by the finished product.
1965 saw the first video adaptation in over four decades, as part of the BBC shows featuring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock. It’s a pretty straightforward version, and one of the best in a sometimes too low-key series. It opens with the disconcerting images of the stricken Tregennis brothers and their dead sister, with wide-eyed Owen and George looking into the camera, gibbering out of their wits. This choice, in contrast with the Jeremy Brett version discussed below, plunges the viewer straight into the story, before introducing Holmes and Watson. The writer—Giles Cooper—takes advantage of every reasonable opportunity to supplement the story. Holmes checks what was visible in the bushes from the outside as well as from within. He’s given a pawky quip to deliver at Watson’s expense when the latter suggests the person in their cottage was just the housekeeper, Mrs. Pascoe—“not unless she’s taken up smoking cigars.” Watson has some valuable investigative work to do—interviewing the vicar to confirm Sterndale’s statement that he’d wired him about the disaster, and after encountering Mortimer as well, he’s able to help the case by sharing his impressions with Holmes, who clearly values them. It’s Watson who experiments with a lamp to provide the baseline for determining when the one in Mortimer’s sitting-room must have been lit. The viewer sees how exactly Holmes deduces that Mortimer dressed in haste on his last morning—a wrongly-buttoned waistcoat. The experiment scene is creepy with a bulging-eyed, crazy-looking Wilmer conveying the dramatic effects of
