DOYLE, Arthur Conan.

£7,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Speckled Band. An Adventure of Sherlock Holmes. First play edition. Doyle wrote this sensational Sherlock Holmes drama in a week to rescue himself from the flailing production of his novel Rodney Stone (1896), staged as The House of Temperley (1910)."I do not think that I exaggerate if I say that within a fortnight of the one play shutting down I had a company working upon the rehearsals of a second one, which had been written in the interval. It was a considerable success... The real fault of this play was that in trying to give Holmes a worthy antagonist I overdid it and produced a more interesting personality in the villain" (Doyle, pp. 96 & 226).Starring the veteran Holmes actor H. A. Saintsbury alongside Lyn Harding as the villain, the play opened at the Adelphi Theatre on 4 June 1910. It transferred to the Globe on 8 August, running to 169 performances. Doyle adapted the drama from his famous story "The Adventures of the Speckled Band", collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892).This copy is a first impression, distinguished by the light green wrappers, thicker paper stock, and the correct publisher's addresses.

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