Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Hugh Bonneville.

One of Sherlock Holmes finest adventures, and a particular favourite of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of The Speckled Band is always worthy of adaption; its use of sleight of hand and its ability to blend into the gothic marks out in the realm of stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, or even the sense of inevitable of doom as found in The Final Solution, as one of grandness and the science behind deduction firmly established.

Narrated by the incomparable Hugh Bonneville, the awareness of dread, of foreboding, and appreciation for the darkness in someone’s heart come to the boil in an adventure originally printed by the Strand Magazine in 1892, and one that arguably characterises the Victorian era’s use of language when it comes to defining the creatures captured by British and European explorers and soldiers, of venerating the exotic but applying them to negative connotations, of typifying race with crude allegories of animal like behaviour, and it is to this that the cunning of avarice is promoted by the despicable Dr. Grimesby Roylott.

In a classic locked room mystery, Hugh Bonneville dedicates his own vocal intrigue to the aiding of the listener’s appreciation and understanding of how a human being can be so scheming to murder his own step-daughters, of how the threat of removing money from a man to whom is allegedly a legal guardian when the woman ties the matrimonial knot, can send him down a path of pre-emptive revenge.

Hugh Bonneville’s narration is one of respect to the immortal words set by Conan Doyle, a pride taken in recounting the insight of Sherlock Holmes and one grafted in admiration; and as the story, spread over three parts and produced by Katrina Hughes and Addison Nugent, intensifies, as it pours detail on how someone can die with no suspicion thrown onto another person because of the locked door, the listener is granted illumination, of understanding the brilliance of the maverick-like application to writing that emanated from every pour of the renowned writer.

Methodical but painstakingly disciplined, no effort is wasted, no deduction left out; and in Hugh Bonneville’s direct narration the world of Sherlock Holmes comes brutally alive. A sheer audio drama of absolutes, of imagery, of diction, and tragedy; The Adventure of The Speckled Band is a presentation of recital.

Ian D. Hall