Sherlock Holmes. Dracula. Two iconic characters of Victorian literature. One, the living embodiment of reason and logic. The other, a being of unimaginable evil.<\/p>\n
I never would have thought of Dracula as a Holmes foe, and then a friend of mine handed me Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File<\/i>, and I wanted to gag about two-thirds of the way through the book. There’s a revelation Saberhagen makes about Holmes’ family lineage that just smacked me across the face as being so wrong<\/b> that I could barely finish the book. But then I chanced across an old copy of Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula<\/i>, and I wondered why
\nafter this book anyone else needed to attempt the pairing because I thought Estleman hit everything right<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Estleman tells an untold Watsonian tale of Sherlock Holmes’ investigations into the crash of the cargo ship Demeter<\/i> on the Whitby coast, and his subsequent investigation of the mysterious Bloofer Lady who attacks small children on Hampstead Heath. Soon, Holmes finds himself on the trail of Abraham van Helsing — and the mysterious Count Dracula. Holmes and Watson are integrated ingeniously into the background of Bram Stoker’s Dracula<\/i>, leaving Stoker’s original intact.<\/p>\n
I don’t have any objections to Holmes battling the supernatural — I count Estleman’s novel as one of the best post-Doyle Holmes stories. What I objected to was how Saberhagen took away from Holmes the unique rational viewpoint that defined the character. Estleman put Holmes in a similar situation, but had Holmes use his rational skills to eliminate the impossible to come up with a highly improbable solution. Saberhagen made Holmes into a believer in the supernatural from the start. The conflict between the rational and the irrational was lost.<\/p>\n
In the early 80s the BBC mounted a radio adaptation of Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula<\/i>. I’ve long wanted to hear it, and this week BBC7 is making it available for listening. Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula<\/i><\/a> stars John Moffatt as Holmes, Timothy West as Watson, and David March as Count Dracula.<\/p>\n I’m looking forward to listening to this audio adaptation of a book I’ve long enjoyed. Holmesian and Draculaphiles should check out this audio drama within the next few days before it goes back into the darkness of the BBC’s crypt. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sherlock Holmes. Dracula. Two iconic characters of Victorian literature. One, the living embodiment of reason and logic. The other, a being of unimaginable evil. I never would have thought of Dracula as a Holmes foe, and then a friend of mine handed me Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File, and I wanted to gag about two-thirdsContinue reading “On a Sherlock Holmes\/Dracula Radio Play”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[164,667,4134,29],"class_list":["post-5431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","tag-audio-drama","tag-bbc","tag-dracula","tag-sherlock-holmes","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}