From Mercury to Mars: The Shadow of the Great Detective: Orson Welles and Sherlock Holmes on the Air
In this tenth installment of our ongoing From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 Years series (in conjunction with Sounding Out!), A. Brad Schwartz explores the connection between Orson Welles and Sherlock Holmes. From his earliest experimentation with radio as a student to his final radio performance in the 1950s (a BBC production of “The Final Problem”), Welles regularly turned to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.
Schwartz, who co-wrote the recent PBS special on the “War of the Worlds” panic, argues that echoes of the Holmes stories can be heard throughout Welles’s radio work, including his performance as the ethereal crime-fighter The Shadow. It was partly by learning from Conan Doyle’s example of great storytelling, Schwartz claims, that Welles reshaped the rules of radio drama.
Click here to read A. Brad Schwartz’s full post over on Sounding Out!.
This post is the tenth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang on Monday, January 20th.
Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.
