The second of four adventures of The Ordeals of Sherlock Holmes from Big Finish, starring Nicholas Briggs as Sherlock Holmes and Richard Earl as Dr Watson, is a more traditional Sherlock Holmes adventure that spends the first third of its duration in Holmes’ rooms with the client telling Holmes & Watson of his troubles.

THE GAMEKEEPER’S FOLLY

The year is 1895, some 15 years after The Guttering Candle, when Holmes is visited by Jim Hinderclay (Ken Bones) – the gamekeeper of the titled The Adventure of The Gamekeeper’s Folly – who tells Holmes & Watson about his early life in a remote English village, leading up the arrival of his daughter.  At age 18, his daughter disappeared, leaving behind a note of having gone to seek her fortune in London.

Hinderclay spent a long time searching for his daughter, well beyond the limitations of his meagre finances, until he was recalled to retake his position.  He believes it was folly to give up on his search, and had all but abandoned hope over the intervening years.  Now, 15 years later, his daughter has returned.  At first she takes up where she left off, with no word of what she’s been doing with her life.

However, Hinderclay doesn’t believe that his daughter returned with all of her faculties intact, as she seems wilder, and she takes up strange friendships.

Holmes is at a loss of how he can help Hinderclay, but does agree to visit on the following day.

The Adventure of The Gamekeeper’s Folly begins very much like a traditional Conan Doyle Holmes’ story.  That’s both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is in its contrast to the previous story and settling us back into the Holmesian world that we’re so familiar with.

THE ORDEALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The curse is that it highlights the strengths of Conan Doyle limiting his stories to just the prerequisites of the mystery and the deduction.  By that I mean that the expositional nature of the first 20 minutes or so of this story, as Hinderclay’s tells his story, feels like padding – as though they know the adventure needs to last 60-70 and it’s easier to pad out an explanatory scene than it is to delay the reveal later in the story.

This is most obvious in the number of ways Hinderclay apologises to Holmes for everything and nothing before he gets around to what brought him to Holmes in the first place.  This is compounded by a sequence with Holmes uncharacteristically expounding the virtues of Watson’s literary output, serving to do little beyond spending time ignoring Hinderclay and, thus, adding further delay to his story.

The sad thing is that this would have felt a little less like padding if Holmes had spent some several minutes deconstructing the gamekeeper from his appearance and aspect.  The “deduction” aspect of these stories is somewhat lacking, as it was in the previous story (did Holmes really need to repeat the “wedding band” deduction in the space of minutes in The Guttering Candle..?).

Nevertheless, the atmosphere and production of The Adventure of The Gamekeeper’s Folly is captivating in its Conan Doyle-esqueness.  Nicholas Briggs and Richard Earl continue to excel in their roles of Holmes & Watson, and they make it easy to ignore any weaknesses of the narrative.  You just want to spend time in their company, and that is more than enough to lift The Adventure of the Gamekeeper’s Folly to the very enjoyable level.