Miles Kington: Why Bert can say: Honey, I'm Holmes

'The "new" Holmes is about an actor so disliked he gets killed. Nobody could claim that stretches credulity...'

There was a time when I bought everything by Conan Doyle that I could lay my chequebook on, and the only thing that I ever refused to buy of his was a book I found lying in a second-hand book sale in a psychic centre in Holland Park. It purported to have been dictated by the late Sir Arthur's spirit across the ether, and the dustjacket said: "This is the first book to be written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle since his recent death..."

No, it was the real world of Holmes that we shall remember Conan Doyle for, not the spirit world, and one of the best things to happen on Radio 4 over the years has been the excellent series of dramatisations of Sherlock Holmes stories written by Bert Coules. All of them, I think, have come out on tape, and many a long drive in the Kington car has been made less weary for the Kington family by a dose of Bert Coules's Holmes stories.

There was always one serious limitation to the Sherlock Holmes stories, however, and that was the fact that Conan Doyle stopped writing them. There being only a finite number, Bert Coules was going to find that the better he got at adapting Sherlock Holmes, the less chance he had to exercise those skills. Indeed the day was going to come when he would have no Holmes left to go to.

That day has now come. But Bert Coules has done an ingenious thing. He has decided to go on writing new Sherlock Holmes stories, based on references in Dr Watson's notebooks to cases that Holmes had tackled but that Watson had never written up. Well, reasoned Coules, if Watson had never written them up, that was no reason why Coules should not use his skills to do so, so he has taken some of these cases (usually just a one-line reference) and fleshed them out in a series that started last Wednesday with The Madness of Colonel Warburton.

I suppose Holmes addicts will shudder at the thought of someone pretending to be Conan Doyle, and I think when I was more of a purist I would have felt the same, but by mere chance, the day before I listened to the first of the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes I happened to read one of the genuine Sherlock Holmes stories, a late one called Thor Bridge. Like some of the other later stories it was pretty feeble stuff, and I have to say that the new Bert Coules Holmes yarn was a lot better than the worst of Conan Doyle.

What was very odd about The Madness of Colonel Warburton, and what made it unlikely that Doyle could ever have written it, was that it was all about, and against, spiritualism. In the story Colonel Warburton had become convinced that his late wife was speaking to him through a pair of mediums and that he should follow her instructions from beyond the grave to change his will in favour of the mediums.

It turns out not only that the two mediums are frauds, but that Colonel Warburton is being blackmailed by them to go along with their chicanery – and that is where Conan Doyle would have parted company with this story, because he was such an avid believer in spiritualism, and I do not believe that he could have written, even fictionally, about fake spiritualists.

I have just been consulting the recent excellent life of Conan Doyle by Martin Booth to find out how seriously Doyle took spiritualism and was taken aback to find that it wasn't a late enthusiasm but that he was entranced by it from an early age. Booth could not understand – and nor can I – how such a trained, logical mind as Conan Doyle's could take the idea of communicating with the spirit world so seriously. Extraordinarily, Conan Doyle and the famous Houdini attended some of the same seances together, and whereas Houdini instantly saw how they were being faked, Conan Doyle was so anxious to believe that he could not bear to be told of the trickery involved. (One thing that struck Houdini as odd was that when his own dead mother "spoke" to him in the seance, she did so in clear English. At the time of her death she spoke only Yiddish and German. Conan Doyle was of the opinion that she might easily have had English classes on the other side...)

Ah well – there's always next Wednesday and another "new" Sherlock Holmes story. This one is called The Star of the Adelphi and is apparently about an actor who is so disliked that he gets killed. Well, I don't think anyone is going to claim that that stretches our credulity too far...