Read by Rick Reiman. In this story, one of Doyle’s favorites, Sherlock Holmes must avert a European war by solving a mystery absolutely befuddling to all but this greatest “consulting detective” of all time. At once full of high tension and broad comedy, the autistic Holmes must navigate through the tangling murky politics of sexual...
Every Doyle story contains slips and errors, whether of outrageous fortune or simply haste. In this four-minute introduction to the complete story, which I narrate next in this series on AudiblySpeaking, I bring the listener’s attention not only to some of these mistakes but also to some foregrounding of the backstory surrounding its writing and...
Read for you by Rick Reiman. This excellent addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon contains many of the aspects that delight his readers. It is set in a macabre and romantic setting, the moors of Cornwall; it has Holmes pitting himself against the common feeling that there must be something supernatural afoot. These traces of...
Some reflections on July 4, its historical significance and its changing meaning yesterday and today in American culture. The Declaration of Independence, painted by John Trumbull
One of Doyle’s favorite Holmes stories is this one, about an interpreter who gets caught up in a strange “country house” mystery, replete with plaster of paris victims and giggling villains. We also are introduced to Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, and the hilarious Diogenes Club, the favorite of unsociable, “unclubbable,” men– such as Mycroft and Sherlock...
Here is my editorial on the Supreme Court’s decision today, June 24, 2022, overturning a Supreme Court decision of nearly fifty years’ standing, and, for the first time, restricting an individual right that it had once recognized itself. The Court’s reputation will likely fall in the days ahead, in no small part because of the...
In this early entry in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Doyle has Sherlock Holmes doing most of the talking. That’s unusual in the canon, because it is typically John Watson who tells the story, not Holmes. This was on Doyle’s short list of favorite stories, and it is easy to see why. It has elements of...
What was Watergate all about? What was Nixon guilty of and how was he brought to heel? What are the myths that still encrust the story of Watergate? In this episode, this historian fills in the background, exposes the “Woodstein” myths that conceal the truths about Watergate, and briefly makes some cursory comparisons and contrasts...
In this rather offbeat addition to the Sherlock Holmes Canon, Holmes somehow finds himself on a college campus battling the timeless forces of student cheating. Three students are each suspected of taking an advance and fraudulent peek at test questions for an exam qualifying them for an important scholarship. Only one can be guilty. When...
“Juneteenth,” a Podcast Episode for North Square The Emancipation Proclamation, from The Library of Congress
READ FOR YOU BY RICK REIMAN. In this story by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes must represent a client being blackmailed by the notorious criminal, Charles Augustus Milverton. Once again, Holmes uses the practices of the criminal himself, something he seems all too eager to employ in more than one of the stories in the Sherlock...
Here I share some insights into what I have learned about the hidden Sherlock Holmes, from reading and narrating the Conan Doyle stories. To do this I use one of his most popular stories by way of illustration, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” You can listen to my narration of this classic short story...
Once again, as in “A Study in Scarlett,” Arthur Conan Doyle reaches across the pond for material for a Sherlock Holmes story. In this case, it is a short story, about the long reach of the past and the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan in America. Three generations of Englishman face death from the...
Read by Rick Reiman, this was Doyle’s anticipated ending to the Sherlock Holmes story, the story that would “finish” Holmes off in the early 1890s, and leave Doyle free to write about other characters whom he was not so tired of. But it was not to be. Doyle’s readers, including Queen Victoria, insisted that Doyle...
Read for you by Rick Reiman Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes’s Older Brother, who “is” the British Government in the case of the Bruce-Partington Plans
“I think that we are both agreed, Inspector that the fragment of paper in the dead man’s hand, bearing, as it does, the very hour of his death written upon it, is of extreme importance.” -Sherlock Holmes
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Richard A. Reiman, host of AudiblySpeaking and author of the article above, narrated this article, published in The Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2(2), 2019, 180-226, and available as a Create Commons document at https://jpr.winchesteruniversitypress.org/3/volume/2/issue/2/. Today’s recording is a reading of Part 1 of 3 of this article. Coming soon: Part 2.