Sherlock Holmes and the Singular Adventure of the Gloved Pianist
A couple of years ago [member] Dr Auberon Redfearn portrayed the great detective in Alan Stockwell's murder mystery play The Singular Adventure of The Gloved Pianist.  Now the author has published the script, with a fuller account of the case, as told by Dr Watson, in Sherlock Holmes and the Singular Adventure of The Gloved Pianist (Vesper Hawk Publishing).  Always at a loss for a suitable Christmas present for his friend, Dr Watson gives him a subscription to the Baker Street Chamber Music Society, little suspecting that the first recital they attend will be marred by the gruesome murder of Guido Salvato the celebrated 'gloved pianist'.  The suspects include a professional rival and a jilted lover, but Holmes needs all his skill and specialist knowledge to discover the culprit.  Watson's narrative includes a less grisly but equally baffling mystery, that of the disappearance of the Hon Edward Dunstable.   As I said of the earlier volume The Singular Adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes (also available from Vesper Hawk) "The Style is an acceptable simulacrum of Dr Watson's, and Mr Stockwell clearly knows his period and his Canon. He also has an engagingly inventive imagination."  The acting version of The Gloved Pianist would be great fun to stage, as the audience has a significant role in the drama.       -- The District Messenger - Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London  June 2010Alan Stockwell's pastiche was dramatized as "The Singular Adventure of the Gloved Pianist" and performed for the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 2008; Stockwell has turned the play back into a pastiche, and his SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SINGULAR ADVENTURE OF THE GLOVED PIANIST is an entertaining mystery in more ways than one with opportunities for audience participation.  -- Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press   August 2010This new Sherlock Holmes pastiche is presented in a book of imaginatively novel structure. First. there is a short self-contained Holmes Adventure --as it were, a taster, Buy-One-Get-One-Free. Then follows the title mystery in text form, the book ending with a dramatized version of it. As in his previous volumes, Alan Stockwell gets close to the authentic Watsonian narrative style, and the reader is transported convincingly back into the ambience of the (here) Edwardian era. The story introduces a very ingenious basic idea, whereby the latest technology of the age conspires to produce a crime unique in the annals of malefaction. The tale is strongly plotted, and all the loose ends of the suitably tangled skein are neatly teased out and tied together at the end, with a satisfying profusion of false trails along the way. The whole is seasoned with some sly touches of humour -- not to mention the odd pawky pun. The inspired concept of setting the principal action entirely in the concert hall of the Baker Street Chamber Music Society greatly facilitates its translation into dramatic form, the audience at the play becoming the audience in the concert hall. As I was privileged to take the part of Holmes in the first performance at Smarden, Kent, in 2008, I can vouch for the fact that the drama plays extraordinarily well. To paraphrase a closing remark by Holmes, the demonstration of method in the one case, and the murder in the other, were both effected by means which "would have been impossible just a few years ago". If this intriguing fact does not make you yearn to read the book, then it jolly well should!  -- The Sherlock Holmes Society Journal, Winter 2010