The Tangled Skein

The Tangled Skein, author David Stuart Davies accoomplishes a creative coup by arranging the fateful meeting of two of literature's most resilient characters: Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. The setting is 1888 London shortly, after "The Hound of the Baskervilles" case. It opens with Holmes' characterstic derisive reaction to a newspaper account of a local lecture by Amsterdam University Professor Abraham Van Helsing upon the subject of vampires. The Baker street detective's opinions of the supernatual are quite set and intransigent. The events which proceed from this moment of contempt and disbelief, however, eventually make a believer of Holmes and of the listener to Davied Stuart Davies' ability to resurrect the very spirits of Holmes and watson. A mysterious illess begins to afflict the young ladies of a finishing school for girls. Reports of children being attacked and left with bite marks upon their necks appear in the papers. From the outset, Holmes himself is stalked by an assailant whose obsessive, unmitigated hatred and cleverness may cost holmes his life. So filled with complicatons is this gripping drama that the evocative title "Tangled Skein" could scarcely have been better suitted. Portraying it all with customery style and wit is British actor David lan Davies, whose solitary voice work weaves its own magic and allows us to enter into that place and time, beholding it all vividly in our minds, and forgetting that One Voice has captured our imaginations.