I am going to paste different paragraphs that I’ve written. I want you to analyze and learn writing style and tone.                                                                                               
                                                   When American actress Edith Meiser (1898–1993) initially proposed the idea of Sherlock Holmes radio adaptations for an American audience in 1930, she was told it was “too old-fashioned” and prospective sponsors “wanted a streamlined sleuth.”Footnote1 She persisted, and the series ran from 1930 to 1948 (with some breaks), using a shifting cast of actors and underwritten by sponsors such as Washington Coffee and Chicago-based Household Finance. During its run, when the Conan Doyle estate tightly controlled any use of Sherlock Holmes material, the series earned Meiser the distinction of being the author of more original Sherlock Holmes stories than anyone apart from Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Meiser's radio scripts dramatized Conan Doyle’s stories and characters, and they also shaped audience understanding and expectations of genre as the older detective stories were translated into the modern medium of the interwar radio serial.Footnote2

Edith Meiser had the tenacity, background, and connections to launch the introduction of Conan Doyle’s fictional sleuth to radio. After graduating from Vassar in 1921, she joined a repertory theater company in Detroit before moving to New York. She married Tom McKnight, an advertising executive whose firm, McKnight and Jordan, also produced radio shows. In the male-dominated business of radio – a 1939 CBS press release on the serial focuses on her appearance, describing her as “tall and willowy,” with height and weight cited – Meiser became an accomplished radio script writer, landing a plum assignment of scripting 26 broadcasts for Helen Hayes in 1935.Footnote3 For the Holmes series, she eventually produced 104 original scripts, many of them rebroadcast, and she wrote a syndicated Sherlock Holmes comic strip in 1954–55. Ronald De Waal, creator of the well-known World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1974), wrote to Meiser in 1972 that she “should be given the Sherlockian title of ‘The Woman’ [because she] contributed more to the world of Sherlock Holmes than any other member of [her] sex.”Footnote4 The Baker Street IrregularsFootnote5 invested Meiser in the initial group of six women admitted to the all-male bastion of the BSI in 1991, and yet only eight years earlier the noted collector John Bennett Shaw observed that “many Sherlockians are not aware of the contributions she's made to our field.”Footnote6

These Sherlockian tributes pleased Meiser, but readers of Feminist Modernist Studies may be more concerned by the fact that her name often does not appear in references to the Holmes radio serial. Given that Meiser initiated the project and was the sole script writer for many years, why is it now necessary to recover her contributions? Scanning both scholarship and popular sources referencing this radio serial, the names of the lead actors – the male voices listeners associated with the stories – and male scriptwriters occur frequently; one could say they dominate the credits. For more than a decade, notably, Meiser provided all scripts. Only as late as 1943 were other writers commissioned for scripts, most notably the male crime-fiction writers and critics Leslie Charteris and Anthony Boucher. References to Charteris and Boucher, alone or in combination, often imply ownership of the series with no mention of Meiser, thereby erasing the woman who created and sustained the radio serial throughout its life. Radio historian Patrick Murray notes that the male writers gave Professor Moriarty “a much wider role as a master criminal than in the Conan Doyle stories.”Footnote7 This shift tilts the episodes toward a more action-adventure direction, pulling the characters and plot lines farther away from detection. Meiser's scripts, in contrast, develop the intrinsic interest of the detective and thus contribute to subsequent developments in Sherlock Holmes adaptations.

Meiser's radio serial launched with a broadcast of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” on 20 October 1930. Sherlock Holmes was voiced by the American actor William Gillette, internationally renowned for over a thousand early twentieth-century stage performances as Holmes. 1930 was the year of Arthur Conan Doyle’s death, whose reputation in the United States had suffered in the 1920s partly owing to his championing of spiritualism, including a public falling out with Harry Houdini on the subject. That may explain why in pursuit of her idea, Meiser reportedly had to order books from England to have the complete stories. In a 1936 interview, Meiser noted that “Sherlock is perfect air material. There are not too many clues [...] Sherlock has excellent radio pace. It's uncanny how smoothly it works out for radio adaptation. Conan Doyle had great vision.”Footnote8 Credit to her for her perception, borne out by the dramatizations of the original stories which she often lifted quite directly from Conan Doyle's text. Examining Meiser's history and the scripts she produced begins to answer the feminist intermodernist question of what happens when the “brand” of Holmes and Watson is translated into the American radio market of the 1930s and leads to recuperating Meiser as a significant popular-genre writer of the interwar period.

Initially, all of Meiser's scripts were dramatic adaptations of the original tales and then, with permission of the estate, she wrote new stories for Holmes and Watson. The new stories follow the pattern of later Holmes pastiches: they draw on the original stories to create a case named in passing, fill in backstory, or concoct further adventures for a character. For example, there is “The Adventure of the Typewritten Will,” which takes up Violet Smith from “the Solitary Cyclist” and creates a plot about a forged will; the solution hinges on details of typewriter technology and production chronology. Meiser sometimes used current events as a way of generating a new link to a Holmes story; these also provide hooks for listener interest. In the 1935 story, “Cherchez la Femme,” Meiser used current headlines speculating about Cleopatra’s mummy (“Mummy rumor irks Curators” was one 10 January 1935 news headline) to build a spinoff from “The Reigate Puzzle” in which Sherlock Holmes “reveals” to listeners the secret of Cleopatra’s irresistible appeal to men – hashish. That mystery summarily resolved, Cleopatra's remains are stashed in a nameless backwater Parisian museum.

Although we might expect the portrayal of Holmes to be the starting point for consideration of the radio serial’s role in bringing the great detective to American audiences, in fact what happens with Watson reveals more about the interplay among source material, the new medium, and its listeners. As David Trotter argues, even after radio established itself as a medium for “reportage, chronicle, and fiction, it retained its connective credentials [...] [R]adio spoke directly to the individual listener in her or his own home.”Footnote9 Meiser understood the consequences of the medium both technically and in terms of characterization and connection. Meiser's Watson serves the narrative functions he does in the Conan Doyle stories, but his persona shifts to adapt to the medium. By the series’ final years, Murray notes that “Watson was in fact becoming the dominant character.”Footnote10 In a 1983 interview, Meiser observed that the fan mail came to Watson, particularly during the Rathbone/Bruce years of 1939–46; “hardly anyone,” she said, “ever wrote directly to Holmes.”Footnote11

On the radio, Watson’s de facto role as intermediary between the audience and the great detective in Conan Doyle’s tales included activities such as plugging for sponsors and being the face of the program for viewer participation. In November 1931, those listening to “The Cardboard Box” were teased with the possibility of a radio version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Over a glass of brandy, the announcer and Watson consider the “most famous and thrilling case of Sherlock Holmes’ entire career,” and the announcer invites listeners to “drop [Watson] a line – a post card will do – in care of the station to which you are now listening.” Watson exclaims, “I do hope they decide to let me do it!”Footnote12

Meiser's radio Watson, then, arguably becomes more modern as he flogs his Clipper Craft suit which “stays neat and natty”Footnote13 while dramatizing on air the dangers facing Holmes. Alison Light draws a contrast between Watson and Hastings, suggesting that Christie “sounds a modern note [...] an ironic, debunking one” in making Hastings “more of a stooge than a helpmeet” in contrast with the teasing respect accorded Watson.Footnote14 Meiser's radio Watson shifts in the direction described by Light, partly due to the nature of the (modernizing) medium. For instance, to those who criticized her Watson as “a bit of a sissy,” Meiser replied in an interview that “it was necessary [...] to have Watson always a bit nervous. Otherwise listeners never would know the risks Sherlock was taking.”Footnote15 Radio historian John Dunning claims that “as in the movies, Watson was something of a disappointment. In the mass media he never approached Conan Doyle’s intent – a man of high intelligence whose brain seemed small only in comparison with Holmes’ deductive genius.”Footnote16 Meiser's understanding that Watson is needed to establish scenes and to create suspense – things that Conan Doyle could construct by other means in his stories – advances recognition of his character not as a disappointment, but as a key figure for audience engagement. The demands of the modern medium shape Meiser's presentation of the character. I would argue, furthermore, that her radio Watson set expectations that were continued by Nigel Bruce's portly, bumbling Watson when first brought to film by Hollywood in 1939.Footnote17 Making these connections emphasizes Meiser's enduring contribution to shaping audience engagement with Holmes and Watson across multiple media and over many decades. As the quintessential English detective's “brand” has continued to evolve, the contributions of Edith Meiser deserve recognition. Not only did her intervention sustain and expand audience engagement with the stories, but her understanding of interwar audiences and the new medium of radio has had an enduring impact on the depiction of the detective's faithful Watson.