Stars: Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce
Everyone's wondering where Sherlock Holmes is, because he certainly isn't in London investigating the murders where you might expect him to be. He and Dr Watson are fishing in Scotland because apparently he's been having dizzy spells and feels he's no longer up to the fight. They have been reading up on the cases though, while pretending not to, and even bring a rather inappropriate description to bear. 'Filthy pyjama murders' really doesn't sound right and Bertram Millhauser, the scriptwriter, needs spanking for that one. It's bad enough to make even Holmes want to join that long string of suicides, and sure enough he faints away to death, off a high bank into the river which sweeps away his body, leaving only his trusty Watson behind.
It's a particularly nasty trick to play on Watson and Lestrade and especially poor old Mrs Hudson, but he plays it nonetheless, reappearing mysteriously in disguise as a postman only when Watson donates his papers to the British Museum and deservedly receives a good punch to the jaw from Watson in the process. He's come back to London to find out which Machiavellian mind is behind the murders, as he believes them to be. He also believes they're the work of a woman, picking her victims from the ranks of well to do gamblers, and he didn't even have the title of the film to go by, or even the way we first meet the Spider Woman, Adrea Spedding by name. She's happily discussing her crimes with her assistant, Norman Locke, who in the form of Vernon Downing has got over the facial tics he had in the last Holmes film as Lt Clavering.
Millhauser doesn't even attempt to make a mystery out of whodunit here, instead concentrating on how it was done, and he does conjure up a suitably fiendish and ingenious method for us to figure out. The purest detective fiction ever gets is the locked room murder, and that's what all these murders are. The victims all went to bed in locked rooms and promptly committed suicide. The method isn't entirely new, bearing some similarities to The Murders in the Rue Morgue but ratcheting it up a few more notches, courtesy of the wonderful Angelo Rossitto who doesn't get enough of a role. The best part has to go to a kid called Larry, apparently Adrea's nephew who even Holmes calls a 'cunning little beggar'. Unfortunately he isn't listed at IMDb, even with an 'uncredited' credit, so I have no idea who he is but he certainly made an impression, which was precisely the point.
The film does too, being fine pulp entertainment but without a huge amount of substance. Even Sondergaard gets next to nothing to do, especially as she could easily have been spun out into the female equivalent of Prof Moriarty, pun very much intended for a change. For someone with such cunning and forward thinking as Adrea Spedding, she really didn't deserve such a quick capture, but then the end of a film hurtles towards the cast so quickly when it's only 63 minutes long. It's more like an episode of a TV series, which to be fair is a good comparison to film series like this. Characterisation is really reserved for the regular cast and takes place over the run of a season, with the guest stars turning up to look good and play a part and be gone again. It would have been fun to watch one of these a week, wouldn't it? As long as it wasn't on Fox, because they'd have shown them out of order and cancelled the thing halfway through its run.
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