In The Tangled Skein, author David Stuart Davies accomplishes a creative coup by arranging the fateful meeting of two of literature's most resilient characters: Sir 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' characteristic 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 supernatural 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 David Stuart Davies' ability to resurrect the very spirits of Holmes and Watson. A mysterious illness 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 complications is this gripping drama that the evocative title Tangled Skein could scarcely have been better suited. Portraying it all with customery style and wit is British actor David Ian 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.
