The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes: Nine Adventures from the Lost Years
Series: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
By: Ted Riccardi / Narrated By: Simon Prebble
Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
Oh gosh, I LOVED the premise, the writing, Simon Prebble… -But-
Good cow did I doze!
I KNOW! The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes has all, and I do mean aaaallll, the elements to make for a stellar 13 (Freaking… just saying…) hours and 18 minutes. And the writing and subject matter were so goshdanged appealing that I googled Ted Riccardi to find out how the heck he managed to make everything sound so authentic, how he managed huuuuge aspects of a vaaaast amount of cultures over an exceeeedingly large expanse covering the East and the Far East.
Turns out the man is (Uhm, WAS, he died in 2020, which I did NOT see until I googled again just now and found his obituary, thus making me feel a tad—just a tad—sheepish about not roundly huzzah-ing this, his tremendous efforts) a scholar and expert of great renown on South Asia and Himalayan region research.
When Sherlock Holmes died with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, he actually did NOT die but spent a few years traveling throughout Asia, doing some sleuthing, fighting crime, and tracking down remnants of Moriarty’s gang.
The stories are wide-ranging and have suuuuch diverse characters truly representative of the cultures Holmes winds up in. There was a huge amount about British colonialism at the time, and I think Riccardi does an excellent job with a slooow metamorphosis of Holmes’s character and belief system. No, Holmes has never been one for the pomp and ceremony of the British upper crust, but he kinda sorta does indeed not have too much of a problem with Imperialism.
Slowly, as Holmes sees how the citizens of each region are affected by this, how they’re horrifically exploited, how the Western elites feel such gratification in watching natives bow and scrape and grovel as they serve, well, Holmes truly begins to see how obscene the whole thing is. Riccardi holds no bars when it comes to his story crafting so that the Listener is Right There with Sherlock through each overwhelming encounter. So that right there is worth the time of many of these stories.
That said, however, wellll, I DID do Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s collection of short stories, and dude! those puppies did not go on and on and on as these stories do. I mean, I s’pose I get it: Those had to be short as they were printed in “The Strand” magazine, and here they’re supposed to be tales told to Watson over leeeengthy walks, or maybe in bits and pieces over great lengths of time, but yikes! These stories, believe me, are nothing if not THOROUGHLY crafted, adding bells and whistles, and lots o’ history.
All those bells and whistles, all those oh so many characters from oh so many countries are done superbly by Simon Prebble, always a fave narrator of mine. If you find yourself considering an audiobook, and you see Simon Prebble is the narrator? Snatch it up, like, posthaste! Cuz man are you in for a grand performance. I remember reading an article fairly recently where some narrators felt bad about how they performed characters from other cultures, but here, Prebble rocks it. His Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist characters are each given unique twists and turns in their voices, so one pictures in one’s mind a unique character, either helping Sherlock, or hindering him, or trying to decapitate him. So wonderful!
There are tales of ghosts, great prophecies, the reverence of gigantic rats which somehow leads to kidnapping and slavery, prostitutes being shamed, spiders killed when they really shouldn’t have been, Princesses, Maharajas, and naaaaaturally there are people just being bad people…. and remnants of Moriarty’s gang. So good and enlightening, just exCESsively written to the point where I dozed a couple of times, and it was NOT because I just scarfed a Bavarian cream donut, and m’ sugar knocked me out.
Still, it was hugely gratifying to see Holmes’s evolution of character as he ponders greed, as he ponders dominance and exploitation.
Lemme end on a high note here, tho’ out of respect to Riccardi as a brilliant researcher and a fine crafter of the lost years of Sherlock Holmes: Yeh coulda used some editing, but seriously? When Watson is THAT excited?
Well, that’s an awesome thing to behold…!
Free listening for Audible Members.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.