Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Roger Llewellyn.

James Moriarty has long been the associated with being the ultimate nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, two sides of a coin, the yin and yang, one a force for peace, the other, the dark blackened contamination that spread its evil and chaos throughout London. Moriarty never showed his full hand until the two men fought at Reichenbach Falls and for a while the avid readers of the great detective’s work and the money men of the Strand magazine felt the shortfall in quality and income.

What if though Professor James Moriarty was just the conduit, the means to an end and Sherlock Holmes had an even greater enemy, a man who really wanted him dead. As Sherlock Holmes himself would have said, the game is certainly afoot. In Sherlock Holmes: The Death And Life, by David Stuart Davies, the parallels between the three men, Holmes, Moriarty and the cunning mastermind, the Godfather of detective fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sees the merging of three intellects, two imagined and one still celebrated today for what he gave the genre and the result is a game of mirrors, a smoke screen surrounding a one sided game of chess of how the writer wanted rid of the man who made him famous.

The world of Sherlock Holmes is revealed to be a fiction, his sibling rivalry with his brother Mycroft, the death of his father, his friendship with Doctor Watson, the façade of London’s smog, villainy, The Study in Scarlet, cocaine addiction…all a pretence, a make believe in which the walls of reality are paper thin and in which Moriarty and Doyle collude to get rid of the millstone that hangs around Doyle’s neck.

The entire audio drama again relies magnificently on Roger Llewellyn who provides the passionate expression and lingering thoughts of the three main players, it is a challenge he rises to with apparent ease as he rises between exulted excitement and deep fervour, suspicion and melancholy. The link between all three men all realised in one script, the near hatred that Arthur Conan Doyle felt for his Victorian hero as he felt that the man was taking over his life, both personally as people stopped him and would say he was the writer of that Holmes man without asking after Doyle himself and professionally as he felt encumbered and hindered in his ability to write other works whilst Holmes lived.

Sherlock Holmes: The Death And Life is an admirable and tremendous piece that underneath the story, the mind boggling narrative that is set up as the three players go about their final destructive paths, the question of who creates who, does the child make the man? Does the writer only exist in the mind of the hero, without whom the writer is a nobody, certainly not a celebrated hero of English literature?

Who attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls? One man walked away to solve crimes another day, one man perished, one would die ultimately forever whilst the child lived on forever linked to the man who fathered him in his mind. Sherlock Holmes: The Death And Life is a magnificent piece of English literature and one that should be heard and savoured.

Sherlock Holmes: The Death And Life is available to buy from Worlds Apart, Lime Street, Liverpool.

Ian D. Hall