Clive Merrison is the only actor to play Holmes in every one of Doyle's stories, so we built this crate as a walk backward and sideways from his BBC run. You'll find wartime American radio, a Rathbone double bill at a 1940s picture house, the very Strand issue where the short stories began, and Paget's drawings in their first hardcovers. It ends with a 1993 CD-ROM case file, cut in the same years Merrison was in the studio. Pull up a chair by the fire and start anywhere.
1
This is the BBC radio cycle where Clive Merrison and Michael Williams worked through every Doyle story, adapted by Bert Coules, packed here into a hefty 526-file bundle. It starts the crate because it's the one Holmes who did it all, which makes him the perfect guide back through everyone who came before.
2
Here is the Mutual-era Holmes whose blustery Watson the BBC set out to correct: a cleaned-up 52-episode set, a thrift-store gift box someone lovingly digitized, a Christmas special, and a 1946 sealed-room Moriarty caper from the show's final Rathbone season. Listen for how much the partnership changes when Watson gets to be clever.
3
Rather than a bare print, this is Terror by Night served the way 1946 audiences saw it, with coming attractions, a cartoon, a true-crime short and a second feature in a recreated second-run double bill. Rathbone and Bruce on a night train to Edinburgh is the image most of us carry in our heads when we hear any radio Holmes.
4
This is the issue where "A Scandal in Bohemia" first appeared, the opening short story and the start of everything Coules later adapted for Merrison. Turn the pages and you'll meet Irene Adler exactly as Victorian commuters did.
5
The archive didn't turn up loose Paget prints, so we went to where his drawings actually live: the 1892 first one-volume Adventures, the 1894 Memoirs, and a 1902 Hound. Flip to the plates and there's the sharp profile and the travelling cap that every later Holmes inherited.
6
ICOM's 1993 full-motion-video disc hands you three crimes, a stack of mock London newspapers, and the job of presenting your case to Holmes himself. It was on shelves while Merrison was mid-canon at the BBC, proof that the early nineties couldn't get enough of Baker Street.
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