About the podcast
About
Welcome to However Improbable, a podcast narrating and discussing the great detective.
Join detective literature enthusiasts Marisa and Sarah in revisiting Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic tales. We read them uniquely in chronological order rather than by publication date. Together, we’ll go on a journey through a three-decades-long friendship as it happened to the characters themselves, from Watson and Holmes’s introduction in A Study in Scarlet through their retirement.
Every other week, we present a fresh new recording of Holmes and Watson’s adventures, and then delve into the story, its history and politics, adaptations, and why we’re still so captivated by the detective and his good doctor. Holmes himself famously said that there’s nothing new under the sun—but we’re willing to give him a run for his money.
The Hosts:
Marisa Mercurio
Marisa Mercurio (co-creator, co-host, artist) is a Michigan-based writer and scholar of gender, sexuality, and empire in nineteenth-century British literature, with emphases on the Gothic and detective fiction. Yes, she knows that’s a mouthful. No, it doesn’t get more succinct than that.
When she’s not researching dashing women solving mysteries for her PhD, she’s a jack-of-all-trades artist with a penchant for horror, hiking, and gardening.
You can find her at the library or in the woods, or on Twitter and Wordpress.
Sarah Kolb
Sarah Kolb (co-creator, co-host, sound designer) is a Colorado-based writer, podcaster, and arts marketer, with a passion for unconventional storytelling, detective stories, and rude women. During the day, she’s a professional advocate for regional theatre, art education and gender parity in the arts. She likes murder mysteries, horror stories, long hiking trails, local beer, and lamenting her anguish online. And, yes, she did almost kill someone with a squash once.
In addition to However Improbable, she is the writer and creator of Superstition, a Southwestern gothic audio mystery.
You can find her on Twitter, probably kvetching.
The Author
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (born May 22, 1859–died July 7, 1930) was a Scottish writer best known for his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes—one of the most vivid and enduring characters in English fiction.
Throughout his life, Conan Doyle published four novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction.
Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include adventure fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. Conan Doyle claimed the success of Holmes overshadowed the merit he believed his other historical fiction deserved.
Conan Doyle was also a practicing doctor (publishing pamphlets in support of compulsory vaccinations), a justice advocate, and also twice ran unsuccessfully for parliament. Conan Doyle himself viewed his most important efforts to be his campaign in support of spiritualism, the religion and psychic research subject based upon the belief that spirits of the departed continued to exist in the hereafter and can be contacted by those still living.
We are not here to talk about his war histories. Or ghosts.
The Detective
As the world’s first and only “consulting detective,” Sherlock Holmes and his friend and partner Dr. Watson pursued criminals throughout fictional Victorian and Edwardian London, the south of England, and continental Europe.
Claiming that Holmes distracted him “from better things,” Conan Doyle famously attempted to kill him off in the 1893 story “The Final Problem.” But Holmes just wouldn’t stay dead. More than 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions to the popular Strand Magazine, in which Holmes regularly appeared. By popular demand, Conan Doyle resurrected his detective in the story “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903).
Though not the first fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes is doubtlessly the most widely known and beloved. By the 1990s over 25,000 stage, film, television, and literary adaptations featured the detective, and Guinness World Records lists him as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history.