Michael Hardwick

John Michael Drinkrow Hardwick (10 September 1924 − 4 March 1991 ), known as Michael Hardwick, was an English author who was best known for writing books and radio plays which featured Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.

Hardwick was born on 10 September 1924 in Leeds, Yorkshire and married fellow author Mollie Hardwick in 1961.

Together they co-wrote numerous different books, not just on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, but also Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Bernard Shaw and other giants of the literary landscape.

Between them they also produced novelisations from successful television series such as Upstairs, Downstairs, The Cedar Tree, Bergerac, The Chinese Detective and Tenko.

He adapted most of the episodes of the Sherlock Holmes BBC radio series 1952–1969.

Hardwick penned a dramatisation of "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" for the BBC Light Programme in 1959, which starred Carleton Hobbs as Sherlock Holmes and Norman Shelley as Doctor Watson.

With his wife he wrote a 1963 radio play The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes.

The two also authored a novelization of Billy Wilder's film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

In 1968, they dramatized The Adventure of the Dancing Men and The Sign of the Four for the BBC's television adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Nigel Stock as Watson, but only the latter exists in the BBC's archives.

In 1979, Hardwick wrote The Prisoner of the Devil which features Holmes called in to solve the case of the Dreyfus affair.

The 1980s brought Hardwick's sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles, entitled The Revenge of the Hound published by Villard Books, as well as The Private Life of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes: My Life and Crimes.