This set of six Sherlock Holmes adventures comes towards the close of actor Jeremy Brett's career as Holmes. After these, there would be only six more episodes made, to bring this great television series to a close.
I've previously explained (in the review of box set number five) how Universal decided, in their lack of wisdom, to issue this Granada television series in reverse - and leave out altogether the opening 12 episodes!
To view the episodes in roughly proper order, you must start with the fifth box set, and work backwards. Volume Three is towards the end of the entire series - only Volume Two remains, with its final half-dozen episodes. Universal's Volume One comprises, in fact, three stand-alone mini-TV movies.
To add to the confusion, the actual first disc in this set is in fact labelled Disc three. On it are two of the very finest of all the Holmes television adaptations: The Illustrious Client and The Creeping Man.
The Illustrious Client is as strong a drama today as when written 100 years ago - this could easily have been fleshed out as a feature-length movie. Anthony Valentine features as one of Holmes' most evil of adversaries, the Austrian Count with a penchant for murdering the women he 'loves'.
This is neat casting - in earlier years Valentine also starred on television as a great Edwardian figure of crime fiction, as the gentleman-thief Raffles, a character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung.
While The Illustrious Client is the pick of this box set's crop, the level of all episodes is uniformly high in dramatisation and production standards. I suppose we could be churlish about the fact that 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery introduces a couple of Australians as main characters only because it's so easy to characterise them as villains, but that is a minor flaw - Australians will always be villains to the Poms.
In these adventures (which move move backwards from Disc 3 to conclude with the two episodes on Disc 1), Holmes/Brett is visibly ageing. We are becoming increasingly aware of the Great Detective's frailty. But that effect, caused by Jeremy Brett's own failing health, simply adds to the realism of the dramas. By now we feel we utterly know these characters, as if we in fact shared lodgings at Baker Street. And in six more episodes, we must leave them...
Quality goes up and down, with some artefacts and quite a deal of muting of colours. This is particularly obvious in interior scenes, where the effect overall is of a production shot in sepia, rather than colour. In some part, this may well have been totally intentional - sepia is appropriate for the late Victorian and early Edwardian era - but there is a degree of colour fading which suggests poorly kept source material.
But overall, the quality is acceptable; nothing in the transfers really interferes with the overall high quality of these Granada television adaptations.
Although this Universal release properly begins with the fifth box set in the series, an incidental viewer could do a lot worse than to buy this set if he or she wanted only a taste of Holmes.
I would recommend purchase over rental - and then space out the viewing to make the six episodes strech over at least three weeks. More than two episodes a week of this rich fare would be total indulgence - this is television's high-cholesterol diet, equivalent to baked pears with clotted cream, followed by best Stilton cheese.
