Sherlock Holmes Stories Magpie Audio
Inducted in 2026
Why it is in the collection
Recording more than fifty stories unabridged, one after another, is a form of patience with almost no place in the present economy of attention. Greg Wagland has done it with his own voice and his own production, and he says so plainly: nothing here is someone else's reused work.
This channel is in the collection for its custodial function. It takes public-domain texts — Doyle, Hodgson, Freeman, Wodehouse, Lagerlöf — and returns them to the ear, which is where many of them began, in an age when reading aloud was common. Without that work, a good part of these stories would remain available only to those who sit down to read.
And it is here for its restraint. The narration does not compete with the text; it serves it. There are no effects, no music underlining what the sentence already says, no hurry to reach the ending. It is work built slowly and meant to be heard the same way.
About this channel
Magpie Audio is the narration project of Greg Wagland, who records every reading published here himself. At its core are more than fifty Sherlock Holmes stories, all unabridged, including The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. The texts are in the public domain, as is the accompanying artwork, including Sidney Paget's; the production is entirely his own.
Alongside Holmes, the catalogue opens doors onto other corners of period literature that are seldom heard. There are the cases of Carnacki, William Hope Hodgson's ghost finder, with stories such as The Whistling Room, The House among the Laurels and The Horse of the Invisible. There are R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke mysteries, an early landmark of forensic investigation in fiction. There is Wodehouse, with Right Ho, Jeeves read in instalments, and there are less predictable excursions: Russian tales collected by Arthur Ransome, or a black-and-white audiovisual experiment on a text by Selma Lagerlöf.
What listeners will find is reading aloud done with craft: a single voice, without excessive dramatisation, attentive to the rhythm of the sentence and to the distinction between characters. Most recordings carry captions. It is a channel to take chapter by chapter, with the patience that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature asks for, and a quiet way of keeping alive texts that would otherwise circulate only in print.