Sherlock Sunday - Orlando Pearson
Posted by Steve Emecz on
Every Sunday we're going to celebrate a Sherlock Holmes author with free audiobook codes.
This Sunday it's Orlando Pearson. Orlando specialises in retelling historical events and revealing Holmes involvement in them in a series called 'The Redacted Sherlock Holmes'. In addition to short stories several have been adapted into plays and there is also the first novel length story.
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Audiobooks
A Case of Complex Identity - the Stage Play
The harrowing sequel to A Case of Identity as Sherlock Holmes uncovers a tale as dark as anything seen on the Ancient Greek stage.
Holmes recognizes his nonpareil as he watches cricketer, Don Bradman, at the Oval in 1930.
But Holmes's petitioner is none other than future England captain, Douglas Jardine, who wants Holmes to find a way of getting the better of the Australia star.
Holmes and Jardine devise tactics that meet with extreme success when England make their tour of Australia in the winter of 1932-1933, but are hugely controversial. And these are not the only dramatic events afoot at this time. England's tour coincides with a constitutional crisis in Germany and Holmes and Watson are commissioned by the Foreign Office to go to Germany to stop the march to power of Adolf Hitler.
But the rise of Hitler is not the only matter on the Foreign Office's agenda.
Holmes is petitioned by the groom of the Bedlam lunatic asylum to investigate a couple who have appeared at his stables. And after the notorious winter of 1894-5, the politician Mr. Lawler, previously encountered in The Minister and the Moguls, gives Holmes a commission to investigate whether the climate is changing and whether industrialization is the cause.
Holmes' investigation into climate change has surprising results but are just what Mr. Lawler is looking for. Holmes is left to philosophize on the parallels with the outcome of the Bedlam case.
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.
But is Holmes being entirely honest with Watson about why the foreign office wants the pair to conduct an investigation which can only help the Nazi war effort? And what else might Holmes’ investigation of the German railway network uncover? And how can the United States be persuaded to join the war on the British side?
An account of real events in London, Berlin, and Moscow in the years 1940 and 1941 which still shape the present, the listener may feel hand of both Mycroft Holmes and Niccolò Machiavelli behind the statecraft on display.
