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Every third story is an adaptation of a Conan Doyle story, so the quality of those stories is superb. When Meiser is left to her own devices in writing, she can produce very uneven work. "The Case of the Well Staged Murder" makes for satisfying listening, but "Professor Moriarty and the Diamond Jubilee" is quite contrived, and "New Years Eve in the Scilly Isles" is downright silly. A firebug is seen deserting a ship as it sails out of harbor. The Captain is radioed that the ship will probably go up in smoke at the stroke of twelve on New Years Eve. The lives of 2,000 passengers and crew hang in the balance. So does the Captain turn around and go back to port to unload the passengers and search for the time bombe? Nope. He sails on for 18 hours until he is far at sea and there is only an hour left until midnight. But Holmes arrives in a yacht just in the nick of time. This has my vote for the most contrived Holmes radio pastiche of all times.
John Stanley sounds more like Rathbone than Rathbone, and doesn't muff his lines as often. Alfred Shirley tries manfully, but he cannot quite convey the warmth of Bruce's Watson. The organ music is more subdued and not quite as annoying, but Meiser makes Holmes far too disagreeable. He is the rudest Holmes I have encountered, and very nearly the most conceited. I'm sure that on several occasions, the only thing that prevented Watson from inviting Holmes outside for fisticuffs was the fact that Holmes was an expert amateur boxer.
The 60 page booklet that comes with the collection is a gold mine of information for Holmes afficionados.
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Such brief explanation at the prologue, seems to be the backbone of how Mr. Niehoff sees the forces that drive one sex after the other.
Using the format of a novel, (not of a scientific work) he will seek to provide to reader a view of the possible causes that have lead to such dramatic changes of conception of what is the purpose of a family and what are individuals expecting of it, at least from the perspective of the Western Civilization.
He will attempt to make such explanations by seeing from another dimension a "life time video" the lives of its parents, its ex-wives, a date, a cockroach, a chimpanzee and finally his own in order to understand from a detached perspective why we humans dedicate so much time to sex, when the fact is that for more than 99% of the humans takes a very brief time of the life span, when it is compared to other activities such as eating, working, transportation, sleeping etc. So why on earth we dedicate so much energy to think about it? And why is it that the lack of understanding with the members of the opposite sex is such a source of anguish and pain? A genetic drive is not longer a workable explanation because the fact is that we are not desperate to cover the surface of the planet with more fellow citizens. On the contrary having fewer children is now a common trend worldwide.
Nice so far, the problem is that there does not seem to be any real answer, to which the author can always state that this is a novel not a self-help guide.
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