Michael Hardwick
English author
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. He adapted most of the episodes of the Sherlock Holmes BBC radio series 1952–1969.
Personal life
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.
Sherlock Holmes
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. 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. The two also authored a novelization of Billy Wilder's film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
Some of Hardwick's adaptions for Hobbs and Shelley were translated into German and broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk in the 1960s starring Peter Pasetti as Holmes and various actors as Watson.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55863974. VIAF identifies the subject as 9934320. The Library of Congress control number is n79117278. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1991, 1952 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Hardwick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.