The Speckled Band
WOULD never have thought that Peter Cheyney would seem less immediate than Conan Doyle, but the Peter Cheyney I heard from 2ZB last Sunday seemed to have an almost Dornford
Yates flavour of a past when _ spivs' abounded, the legitimate prey of con. women and Yard men. Not that Pay Off for Cupid was not a workmanlike job; but The Speckled Band, which I heard later the same evening, ran rings
round it, in spite of the fact that it could not boast, as the former did, a surprise ending. The Speckled Band
(radio version) owes a lot to John Dickson Carr’s adaptation, but most of all to its author. In these days when the disappearing icicle and the bubble of CO2 in the bloodstream are fictional commonplaces, we expect ingenuity from our thriller-writers, but 65 years cannot dispel the vigour Conan Doyle breathed into Holmes. The brusque helpfulness towards the distressed, the well-bred insolence meted out to the undeserving, his knowinger-than-thou attitude to Watson are part of a traditiop which no amount of adaptive manhandling can destroy, so that the daffiest screen thrillers get by through the simple expedient of calling in Holmes. In this case John Dickson Carr has done Sherlock Holmes proud, and the result is a radio drama as fresh and vigorous as young Sherlock way back in ’83.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19481015.2.23.1.3
Bibliographic details
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 486, 15 October 1948, Page 10
Word count
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226The Speckled Band New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 486, 15 October 1948, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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