The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

The Mercury Theatre on the air. The Columbia Broadcasting System takes pleasure in bringing you the 12th in a 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 Well's 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 Well.

Good evening. Well, tonight it's back to Baker Street. Back to that unlikely London of the 19th century where a high adventurer waits all who would seek it, in a handsome cab or under a gas lamp in an invonest 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 knows his shape 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. There is also the tall gentleman with

the hawk's face, and the underslung pipe, and the four-and-half cap. We'd know them anywhere and call them easily by name. Punch, and the Charlie's, Chaplain and the Carti, Kiel T, Sir John, and Sherlock Holmes.