The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Nice to have these in 'real time' after buying the full sets on iPad. Fantastic for 'We who love our Sherlock' to be able to pop in a CD for several hours of great entertainment. I bought the two full sets and 'ALL' of them are perfect. Clive Merrison makes a wonderful wity full on Radio Sherlock along with his side kick Dr Watson played by Michael Williams both a real treat. You have about 26 episodes in each set giving hours of Sherlockian pleasure. These were made in the 80's so we get 'proper' Sherlock and not the modern 'based on' versions. These are very much like the stories from Doyals books true to how the writer wrote them. Absolutely splendid radio shows. Have bought all three sets.

I drive a lot for a living, all day, every day.More often than not it takes a fair degree of 'channel hopping' to find anything to listen to that holds my attention. I do have a large collection of music CDs to choose from, but decided that 'talking books' were my preferred choice of companion.I've always liked 'Holmes'....have all the stories in hardback form on our bookshelves, so decided to purchase this and it's sister set !I cannot, fully, stress just how good these collections are....Clive Merrison deserves endless praise for his portrayal of the great 'sleuth'.His delivery of the nuances of Holmes are perfect, managing to portray the impatience, arrogance and humour of Conan Doyle's hero exactly as intended!Michael Williams too, provides a superb contribution as 'John H Watson' .... A calm and measured narrator steering us through each tale! Add to that a near plethora of stars filling the minor roles in the stories, and you have an excellent collection of stories at a reasonable price!

This review is specific to the unabridged audio book read by Derek Jacobi.Published monthly in the Strand Magazine in 1892/3 and collected together as a book in 1894, the memoirs of Sherlock Holmes include some of the best of his short stories. Silver Blaze, Crooked Man, Musgrave Ritual and, of course, The Final problem, have gone down in literary history as thrilling tales of adventure and deductive reasoning. The tales cover a broad range, from Holmes' recounting of adventures in 1880 and 1881 (prior to his meeting Watson) to his faithful Boswell, through to the Final problem set in 1891. So in this collection we get Holmes' first cast, and what Doyle thought would be his last.Doyle gives us a series of mysteries that give their thrills either through astonishing displays of deductive reasoning (Silver Blaze, Musgrave Ritual), from action and adventure (The Final Problem, The Gloria Scott), mixtures of the two (Reigate Squires) and occasionally from a good old fashioned slice of Gothic Horror (Musgrave Ritual again). Problems are not always satisfactorily resolved (The Resident Patient, The Yellow Face), but the telling of the tale is always thrilling.This set follows the tradition of not including the contemporary story `The Cardboard Box', so there are only eleven stories here. Nonetheless it is a five star collection of tales, and consists of:"Silver Blaze""The Adventure of the Yellow Face""The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk""The Adventure of the Gloria Scott""The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual""The Adventure of the Reigate Squire""The Adventure of the Crooked Man""The Adventure of the Resident Patient""The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter""The Adventure of the Naval Treaty""The Final Problem"Derek Jacobi's full text reading, on 8 discs, is a real pleasure. It is the next best thing to reading the actual book. Jacobi provides a great narrating voice, slipping into the role of Watson relating events perfectly. You almost feel as though you are sat next to Watson in his club as he reminisces on his adventures with his friend Holmes. And as he recounts the events leading up to Holmes' death at Reichenbach Jacobi really conveys the sorrow that Watson feels for the loss of his friend. It's masterful. I enjoyed listening to this immensely, and look forward to getting more in the series. 5 stars.

I love Conan Doyle stories and I'm a warm admirer of the Granada series starring Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and David Burke and Edward Hardwicke as Doctor Watson. Eight stories from "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" have been dramatized for television by Granada: Silver Blaze, The Cardboard Box, The Musgrave Ritual, The Crooked Man, The Resident Patient, The Greek Interpreter, The Naval Treaty, and The Final Problem. The introduction and the explanatory notes of the Oxford World's Classic edition are very helpful, and I learned an enormous lot of things by reading them.The introduction by Christopher Roden explains the circumstances in which Conan Doyle wrote the stories,and shows that they become more complex in the Memoirs than they were in the earlier books.He analyzes the themes of each story in an interesting way, the evolution of the main character, and the changes in the relationship between Holmes and Watson.The introduction is also about the relation between Conan Doyle's life and his stories.Of course there is such a lot of explanatory notes that it's impossible to comment all of them. Let's take, for an example, the explanatory notes of Silver Blaze.They tell us what are "furlongs", "a Penang lawyer", and other words which would have certainly puzzled more than one reader, they give many explanations about horse races, comment upon the text (Holmes says: "The calculation is a simple one": is it really simple?), show the connexion between the dog's behaviour in Conan Doyle's novel and Telemaque's dogs one in Homer's Odyssey. Still more interesting is the quotation from Conan Doyle's autobiography (Memories and Adventures) which ends the notes about Silver Blaze:"Sometimes I have got upon dangerous ground where I have taken risks through my own want of knowledge of the correct atmosphere.I have, for example, never been a racing man, and yet I ventured to write Silver Blaze, in which the mystery depends on the laws of training and racing[...]I read an excellent and very damaging critic of the story, written clearly by a man who did know, in which he explained the exact penalties which would have come upon everyone concerned if they had acted as I described. Half would have been in jail and the other half warned of the turf for ever". Is not that useful to get a better understanding of the story and to appreciate Conan Doyle's modesty and humour?

I love listening to these Sherlock adaptations on long journies in the car, they really help pass the time. They are well dramatised for radio and the cast are excellent. The Valley of Fear is my favourite.