A quiet, unassuming single lady receives an unexpected parcel in the post, which turns out to enclose rather grisly contents. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rouse themselves from the lethargy of a sweltering heatwave to investigate a dark crime... The story begins at 00:01:15. See below for notes on the text and the interesting publication history of this story.

Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me (and get access to exclusive content):

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:15 The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
00:58:00 Credits, thanks and further listening

The music used at the beginning and end of the story is an extract from 'Duet for Two Violins' by Luigi Boccherini, Op 5 N2 Larghetto. The image in the title card is a detail from the painting 'Liverpool Docks by Night', by the English artist John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893).

About the author: Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish doctor and author, celebrated for his world-famous creation Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective who set the standard for crime fiction into the 20th century and beyond. In addition to his Holmes stories, Conan Doyle is also remembered for his fantasy and science fiction novels and stories, including 'The Parasite' and 'The Lost World' series of novels, his historical fiction, and for numerous short stories contributed to magazines over a 40 year period. He was knighted by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honours.

'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box' has an interesting publication history. It first appeared in The Strand Magazine in January 1893, the 14th Sherlock Holmes story to be printed by that periodical. However, when the second series of 12 stories came to be collected together for book publication as 'The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes' in early 1894, 'The Cardboard Box' was omitted, so the volume was printed with only 11 stories. This was apparently at Arthur Conan Doyle's request, but his reasons aren't entirely clear: it's been speculated that he worried the themes were too shocking to public sentiment at the time, and/or he regretted that the crime was too "sensational".

It wasn't until almost 25 years later, when a few of Watson's “later reminiscences” published episodically between 1908 and 1917 were collected together in the 1917 volume 'His Last Bow', that Doyle allowed the story to re-emerge. Perhaps three years into World War I the brutality of the crime seemed less shocking... To this day, some collected works of Sherlock Holmes still include the story in 'His Last Bow', whereas others choose to re-insert it in its original place in 'The Memoirs'.

Doyle's decision to withdraw the story from book publication had consequences for another story in 'The Memoirs'. He was particularly pleased with the opening "mind reading" section and was loath to lose it, so he inserted it wholesale at the beginning of 'The Resident Patient', replacing that story's original opening paragraphs. Initially this was rather clumsily done so that the latter story ended up with contradictory references to an August heatwave and stormy October gales, although this was later tidied up in subsequent editions. Again, modern complete works vary, with most restoring the original opening to 'The Resident Patient' and a few retaining the 'Cardboard Box' insert so that two stories have exactly the same opening sequence.

'The Cardboard Box' was also the very last episode of the 1984–94 Granada television series, starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. Like many of the later episodes of that final series, the adaptation made several striking changes to the original, most notably moving the setting to Christmas time, so that the crime of passion takes place amidst a frozen and snowy landscape, instead of a heatwave.

A note on the text: for those reading along with the book, please be aware that there are numerous minor differences between the text of the story as originally printed in The Strand (1893) and the later book publication (1917). They don't impact on the story, but there are several grammatical changes and a few words are replaced with synonyms, e.g. "deep thought" becomes "deep meditation". For clarity, the text read here is the original 1893 Strand Magazine version.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2023