Buy Buy Holmes!

A year or two ago I thought I was done with Mr Sherlock Holmes.  The detective had been irritating me for a while, and my fascination with him was waning. The irregular hours, the pipe smoking, the sneering at policemen, the theatrical disguises, the casual law breaking, the punch ups with mad professors, the sullen silences and childish slumps, the manic bursts of activity, the impenetrable thought processes, and the class A drug intake that could fell an elephant - I was doing all these things just to get away from the Great Detective. I was more and more siding with Conan Doyle when he'd had just about all he could take of Holmes, and hurled the lanky bugger 820 feet off a Swiss waterfall.

I'd had roughly a decade of fun writing a series of Sherlock Holmes radio comedies, and I'd made some great friends along the way.  I'd even managed to get a Sherlock Holmes play staged, albeit briefly, which had long been an ambition of mine, principally because I'd always wanted to get an actor to play Dr Watson as he gets roundly beaten up by a petit housemaid.  But after all the fun of playing with Conan Doyle's marvellous, timeless characters, I wanted to concentrate on writing original works, and make my fortune with staggeringly brilliant novels, plays and screenplays.  Alas, nobody has yet to recognise the staggering brilliance of my original plays, novels and screenplays - not least because I haven't finished them.  But that's a blog for another day.  I'd ran with Holmes and the hounds, and I'd had brilliant fun, but quietly and gently I had stepped away and said goodbye.

Sayornara, Sherlock.

Some time passed.


Out of the blue a very nice man named Ralph from sunny Petaluma, California emailed me to tell me that he was producing one of my silly radio plays.  Then another Californian emailed me to say their theatre company were staging my Holmes comedies, in Jackson, California, completely unrelated to Ralph's award-winning, headline-making group in Petaluma.  And then a drama school teacher in northern Ireland got in touch to ask if she might get her students to perform my Holmes comedies to cheer everybody up over the whole Brexit mess.

I'm writing a sort of silly memoir about all of this - my adventures with Sherlock Holmes, if you will - which will go into forensic detail.  The Christmas present of all the Conan Doyle stories I received when I was nine, and how it changed my life; the Sherlock Holmes radio plays I recorded in my bedroom with my friend Paul (and others) when we were thirteen year olds, and the school project that started it all; the Rathbone films; the comic strips I wrote and illustrated (again with Paul); the screenplay we wrote; the plays I wrote; the lost photo with me in a deerstalker and my mother in her final days; the pilgrimages to Baker Street (and meeting my friend Kim from New York); the internet audio drama group and the very first MOSH series with Jeff Niles and Elie Hirschman; the Devil's Whisper stage play directed by Steph Kempson from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre; the most amazing and charming surprise wedding that made headlines... and so much more.

But the headline today, and the point of this rambling blog update is to enthuse all about the brilliant  Petaluma Radio Players' productions of MOSH, which are simply first-class.  A wonderful cast and superb crew have laboured with love and professionalism to create atmospheric, charming and distinctive comedies that are a complete delight.  Producers Ralph and Kendra, aside from being some of the nicest people on the planet, have overseen a genuinely excellent series, and these are now available from Blackstone Publishing to buy as a boxed set, or as individual stories, at bargain prices.  I can't recommend them highly enough.  And I need the money. 

 https://www.downpour.com/the-misadventures-of-sherlock-holmes-boxed-set?sp=279989