The Hound of the Baskervilles

Review: David Ian Davies has followed his recording of Silver Blaze with the other Dartmoor adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Mr Davies reads, as always, with a relish that he communicates to the listener. His remarkable vocal versatility is again evident in this unabridged reading, which occupies four CDs, and the characters are all carefully distinguished. Actually ‘reading’ is too limited a word. Mr Davies acts the narrative. There are some occasional mispronunciations, though - ‘dyspnoea’, meaning a breathing difficulty, is not pronounced dispan-yay but diss-nee-a, as any good pronouncing dictionary will tell you. And it’s a curious choice to play Sir Henry with a dubious Scottish accent, and justify it by changing the text to give him a background in Canada and Scotland instead of ‘the States and Canada’. Those quibbles aside, this is a fast-moving and engaging performance of Holmes’s greatest case, nicely packaged with a very atmospheric picture of Dartmoor.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 227, 2002]