Sat 5 Jul 2008
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: The Lost Special (Revisited).
Posted by Steve under Authors , Characters , Old Time Radio[5] Comments
In her review of Round the Fire Stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle, posted here in May a year ago, Mary Reed began by saying:
And then in a footnote, she later added the following:
“… and then we have “The Lost Special,” in which we learn of a letter: “… which appeared in the Times, over the signature of an amateur reasoner of some celebrity at that date, attempted to deal with the matter in a critical and semi-scientific manner. An extract must suffice, although the curious can see the whole letter in the issue of the 3rd of July.
“‘It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning,’ he remarked, ‘that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth’.”
And I think we’ll agree the second letter in particular has his grammatical fingerprints all over it, but it raises another question: why didn’t Conan Doyle write these two adventures as Holmes stories? Were these stories written during a period when he was thoroughly tired of his own creation?
[WARNING: SOME PLOT ELEMENTS MAY BE REVEALED.]
In a comment left last April, and inexplicably never acknowledged by me until now, Brian Gould replied by saying:
You ask, “Why didn’t Conan Doyle write these two adventures as Holmes stories?”
A clue to the answer, I believe, is that in both cases the unnamed letter writer was wrong. In “The Lost Special,” the train had been driven onto one of the four side lines of which it was earlier remarked that they “may be eliminated from our inquiry, for, to prevent possible accidents, the rails nearest to the main line have been taken up, and there is no longer any connection.” The villains had temporarily relaid the missing rails.
In “The Man With The Watches,” nobody jumped from one train to another. The dead man had been in the Euston to Manchester express all along, but had removed his disguise before his accidental killing, which occurred when his criminal associate attempted to shoot a third man who had joined them in their compartment but missed.
Doyle’s intention, surely, is humorous. He is simply making fun of his own creation, Sherlock Holmes, who does not usually commit such blunders.
Brian Gould
>>>>>>>
My apologies to Mr. Gould for not pointing out this very useful reply until now. My only excuse is that I was out of town attending the Bordentown pulp and paperback show around the time his comment was posted, and I suspect that in the rush to catch up when I was back here at home, I simply failed to.
But here’s what I discovered that prompted my attention back to “The Lost Special” again, a rare find: one the “missing” episodes of Suspense, one of Old Time Radio’s best-known, and longest-lasting mystery programs.
I won’t post a link directly to the MP3, but I strongly recommend you go to Randy Riddle’s podcast blog and listen to it there, along with more information about both the disk and the program Of special note, until he found the disk, the program may not have been listened to in over 60 years, a “lost special” in and of itself. Excepted from Randy’s comments, here’s the basic info:
Unheard publicly since September 30, 1943, we bring you Orson Welles starring in “The Lost Special” a “tale well calculated to keep in you Suspense!.” Originally broadcast on the CBS radio network, but now lost, the version heard here was distributed by the Armed Forces Radio Service as program 24 in the Suspense series.
“The Lost Special” is based on a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story and concerns a train that mysteriously disappears. The story was also used on the series Escape on February 12, 1949, so it may seem familiar. (You can give it a listen here.) However, in the “Suspense” version, the story is told by the main character and framed as a broadcast by a condemned man that will reveal the identity of persons responsible for certain crimes.
[…]
Orson Welles appeared in the series Suspense eight times between 1942 and 1944 in such classics as “The Hitchhiker” and “Donovan’s Brain.” One of Welles’ performances, “The Lost Special,” was thought to be one of about thirty-five Suspense programs missing out of over 900 broadcast during the run of the series.
Go visit, listen, and enjoy!
July 6th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Dear Brian
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.
On reflection vis a vis the matter of the missing rails in The Last Special, is it beyond possibility the master mind behind the crime is Professor Moriarty, that Napoleon of crime, whose widespread network of criminals could no doubt produce enough men to form the gang of gandy dancers needed to restore the missing rails? According to The Valley of Fear Moriarty had a younger brother who was a station master in the west of England so there’s a connection (no pun intended) to the railways right in the family — not to mention both this story and The Man With The Watches are based on incidents featuring trains.
As for the letters, if the man behind both events is in fact Moriarty, what a temptation for him to send them with hints showing they were written by his arch enemy Holmes, both taunting Holmes and advancing theories that were mistaken. Imagine the grinding of teeth at 221B Baker Street when Holmes read them!
Mary R
July 6th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Wasn’t “The Lost Special” filmed as an episode of the HART TO HART TV series — without any acknowledgment of Conan Doyle’s authorship or story?
July 6th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Mike
It could have happened, but doing a quick run through the plot summaries, I found only one Hart to Hart show that involved a train, that being “Hartland Express.” In that one, Jonathan and Jennifer find a body on a train while they’re traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Of course, the train might have been switched from some other mode of transportation — but I don’t think it would have worked very well without it being a railroad puzzle — or could it have been another series, like McMillan and Wife, maybe?
— Steve
July 7th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Yes, indeed, Mary, that adds a devilishly intriguing twist to the hypothesis.
In the light of a remark that Holmes made to Watson in connection with the Retired Colourman, I am tempted to ask you, Mary, if I may: are you a chess player?
Kind regards,
Brian
July 15th, 2013 at 9:07 pm
If you read-listen-watch between the lines, you realize both the TV serial “Lost” and the graphic novel “Watchmen” were based on “The Lost Special” and on its previous adaptations and the real-life event that probably inspired the original: the loss of Engine 115 into a sink hole in mining country on Sept. 22, 1892 in Lindal, England. Several of the other stories in “Tales of Terror and Mystery” were also referenced slyly by “Lost”.