The Mercury Theatre, on the air.

The Columbia Broadcasting System takes pleasure in bringing you the 12th in its series of weekly broadcasts featuring

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the air.

Tonight, Broadway's and Radio's most celebrated theatrical producing company

brings to life the best-loved character in detective fiction, the immortal Sherlock Holmes.

The play is Orson Welles' own adaptation for Radio of William Gillette's enduring melodrama based on the famous stories

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Before the performance begins, here is the director of the Mercury Theatre,

the star and producer of these unique broadcasts, Orson Welles.

Good evening.

Well, tonight it's back to Baker Street, back to that unlikely London of the 19th century

where high adventurer waits all who would seek it in a handsome cab or under a gas lamp in an infamous cape.

But tonight we pay tribute to the most wonderful member of that most wonderful world,

a gentleman who never lived and who will never die.

There are only a few of them, these permanent profiles,

everlasting silhouettes on the edge of the world.

There is first the little hunchback with a slapstick whose hook nose is shaped like his cap.

There is now and always will be the penguin-footed hobo in the derby in the baggy pants

and the small boy with a wooden head and the long rusty knight on horseback

and the fat knight who could only procure a charge on foot.

And there is also the tall gentleman with a hawk's face and the underslung pipe for an F cap.

We'd know them anywhere and call them easily by name, punch and the charles, chaplain and McCarthy,

...