THE TANGLED SKEIN

Due to early nights caused by the run-up and aftermath of the London Marathon, it’s taken me several evenings to finish this 2-hour adventure from Big Finish.

The first half of The Tangled Skein plays like a traditional Sherlock Holmes adventure stepping into a mystery with a bizarre explanation – a bit like Dr Mortimer retelling “the legend of the hound” in The Hound of the Baskervilles.  However, where The Tangled Skein deviates from that is in the second half where the story fully embraces the world of Dracula and vampires.

Unlike a Conan Doyle story that would attempt to legitimise these fantastic elements of the story, The Tangled Skein embraces them as fact in the real world.  This makes the story difficult to listen to because it puts the verisimilitude of Sherlock Holmes on very shaky ground.

That said, if you accept that this one time, we do get a rollicking good adventure.  We get a sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles, including Stapleton’s efforts to exact his revenge on Holmes, together with a guest-starring appearance from Van Helsing, and an action-packed ending together with some strictly Hammer-esque vampire fighting thanks to the ever more exuberant tones of Richard Earl’s increasingly excitable Dr Watson.

A good story, but not one for the purists.