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Sherlock Holmes Stories Magpie Audio

Magpie Audio is the narration project of Greg Wagland, who records every reading published here himself. At its core are more than fifty Sherlock Holmes stories, all unabridged, including The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. The texts are in the public domain, as is the accompanying artwork, including Sidney Paget's; the production is entirely his own. Alongside Holmes, the catalogue opens doors onto other corners of period literature that are seldom heard. There are the cases of Carnacki, William Hope Hodgson's ghost finder, with stories such as The Whistling Room, The House among the Laurels and The Horse of the Invisible. There are R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke mysteries, an early landmark of forensic investigation in fiction. There is Wodehouse, with Right Ho, Jeeves read in instalments, and there are less predictable excursions: Russian tales collected by Arthur Ransome, or a black-and-white audiovisual experiment on a text by Selma Lagerlöf. What listeners will find is reading aloud done with craft: a single voice, without excessive dramatisation, attentive to the rhythm of the sentence and to the distinction between characters. Most recordings carry captions. It is a channel to take chapter by chapter, with the patience that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature asks for, and a quiet way of keeping alive texts that would otherwise circulate only in print.