Sherlock Holmes on the Air

For two decades, Sherlock Holmes ruled the airwaves in the United States. Beginning in 1931, the character – and, of course, his faithful friend, Dr John H Watson – were regular guest in American homes via the wireless, with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce taking the lead roles from 1940 to 1946.
With the coming of television however, radio drama more of less died out in the States, and new Holmesian audio material became extremely scarce. The exception to the rule seemed to be the CBS Radio Mystery Theater of the 1970s which featured a handful of adaptation of stories from the Canon, most of them featuring Invasion of the Bodysnatchers star Kevin McCarthy as Holmes. But the rest was silence.
Until 1998 that is, when the Seattle-based Jim French Productions recorded the first episode of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (not to be confused with the BBC radio series of the same name, which did not air until 2002). Further Adventures is one of several rotating drama series produced by French and his associates; new episodes are produced at the rate of roughly one a month. The man behind the series is, naturally, writer/producer Jim French, whose experience in radio dates back to 1943 when he served as announcer and pianist for KPAS in Pasadena. French's credits include scripts for Dick Powell Theater and Suspense. In the 1980s he began writing and directing a series of weekly dramas for radio station KIRO in Seattle. On 17 March 1996, French's plays were syndicated under the name “Imagination Theater” and American radio drama began its rebirth.