Showing results by narrator "Keith Spilsbury" in All Categories

The actual events behind A Scandal in Bohemia. Get ready for surprising revelations about that story’s heroine and meet two non-Bohemian kings, a hapless queen, and conspirators who will light the Balkan Powder Keg that sets off World War I.

Holmes is summoned to Geneva by the legendary “Sisi”, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, to “rake through the coals of Mayerling” and learn the true fate of Crown Prince Rudolf, her dead son.

Orlando Pearson mixes the Great Baker Street detective with history both familiar and unfamiliar to deliver his customary heady brew of Holmesiana.

Sir Joseph Porter was first lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore which was a thinly veiled parody of WH Smith, British politician extraordinaire who first held that role and then ascended to the post of first lord of the Treasury. And an astounding revelation about Sherlock Holmes as we make a discovery this is both entirely unfamiliar and entirely familiar.

Why is Ignatius Foley, member of parliament for Perth, so anxious to retrieve some administrative documents that have fallen out of his pocket at his fiancée’s house? His betrothed, Jean Leckie, wants to find out. And what has happened in Bulgaria that makes Mycroft so anxious to dispatch his brother there with promises of major honors for successful prosecution of the investigation? A case set in 1907 and with no parallels whatsoever to more recent events.

This is the 29th story from The Art of Sherlock Holmes project, which first appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part IV.

Two kings, a model, a traitor, two wombats, two poets, an accountant, more lobbyists than you can count, three titans of business, two artists, a pawnbroker…and Sherlock Holmes.

In this story, listeners will discover the solutions to several Sherlockian mysteries.

How do you make a government change its mind? And how do you recover your financial equilibrium after a bereavement? And, come to that, how do you recover your financial equilibrium after you return from the apparent dead when you have asked for no mention of your return be made in the press and so no one knows that your detective agency is back in business?

Watson spends half his wound pension on the turf and his gambling addiction renders him unable even to pay his half share of the rent of the rooms at Baker Street. But when one of his rare bursts of prosperity enables him to buy two strikingly good pictures from a pawnbroker, Mycroft Holmes takes a remarkable interest. And what is the meaning of the little rhyme that runs round the canvas of the painting.

After the close of The Noble Batchelor, Holmes lets his emotionless façade slip by the Baker Street fireside as he tells Watson of his very first case. Dating back to 1869, the case takes in the Thames, London Zoo, Highgate Cemetery, a poet, and a beautiful and tragic female figure.

Can Holmes save a threatened heir apparent without compromising his more vital mission to outwit a German spy? Can Watson spend a week in the country with two beautiful aristocratic ladies and still go home to his third wife? A prequel to His Last Bow.

As young men go to the trenches in their millions, they take with them A. E. Housman’s collection of poetry, A Shropshire Lad. “Easy to read in the most difficult circumstances and full of happy memories of home,” opines Mycroft Holmes. But has Housman succumbed to German influence? Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are sent to investigate and come up with a finding unexpected to them. Mycroft lets their finding pass, but Watson is then witness to some Machiavellian political machinations from Mycroft as he deals with Irish rebel Roger Casement.

It has taken over 80 years, but at long last, the British government’s embargo on reporting this slice of diplomatic history has been lifted. It was in November 1940 that a senior minister at the British foreign office in blacked-out London commissioned Holmes and Watson to go to Berlin to negotiate a prisoner of war swap with the German high command. And the price demanded by Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Göbbels, for any prisoner's release? That the two work with the Berlin police to capture a serial killer who is stalking the city’s railway network.

Recently, a stash of unpublished stories, written by Dr. John Watson, assistant to the legendary consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, were discovered - hidden within the secret corners and shadows of the famous flat at 221b Baker Street. Collected together for the first time by author GC Rosenquist the ten newly unearthed stories detail the very earliest years of the Holmes/Watson partnership and shed a very different, personal and surprising light on their familiar relationship.

Follow Holmes and Watson on their first espionage mission to Imperial Germany as they unmask the plot behind the Kaiser's premature accession. This case initiates a quarter-century of Anglo-German rivalry that will occupy Sherlock Holmes until His Last Bow, when World War I begins.

Endlich wird er von seinem Groβneffen, Meisterdetektiv Sherlock Holmes, vorgestellt – Sherrinford Holmes, Fagottspieler, Linguist, Diplomat, und urspüngliche Inspirazion des Meisterspurhundes. Und Sherrinford Holmes ist nicht die einzige wichtige Person, die wir in dieser Geschichte, die Holmes Watson vor dem Kamin in Baker Street erzählt, kenenlernern.

Mit diesen Worten fängt Franz Kafkas Meisterwerk, Der Prozess an. Das Werk wurde in 1914/5 geschrieben und erst 1925, ein Jahr nach dem Tod des Autors, veröffentlicht. Und in den folgenden Jahrzehnten ist es niemandem gelungen zu enträtseln, was die Geschichte bedeutet. Aber es ist bis jetzt auch niemandem eingefallen, diesen Auftrag an Sherlock Holmes zu vergeben.

A collection of hundreds of Sherlock Holmes puns amassed over decades and stolen from a host of sources. The wordplay may be familiar, but the settings and characters are all original to the sources cited. The puns that have made it into the book are all Sherlockian narratives. Each is a tale describing events featuring Holmes characters, not simply a comment or an observation. We warn traditional Holmes fans up front, you will be annoyed and offended. If you are not, then the authors simply have not found your particular hangup - yet.

Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and Inspector Gregson, long out of touch with Sherlock Holmes, meet the great detective on 28 June 1914, the day of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The Germans have introduced a new code and it has baffled the British secret service. As international tensions increase and more messages in the new code are intercepted, the urgency to decrypt mounts, but Holmes is preoccupied with the events that form the narrative of His Last Bow.