Enyd Williams, the BBC radio drama director whose casting choices fixed the sound of classic detective fiction for a generation of Radio 4 listeners, has died of heart failure aged 83, the Guardian reported Tuesday [1]. She died on June 18. With the dramatist Michael Bakewell she serialised all 12 of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels between 1993 and 2001, casting June Whitfield as the St Mary Mead sleuth. "I simply concentrated on Miss Marple's busybody personality to conjure up a new picture in the minds of listeners," Whitfield said [1].

Her run stretched further than any single title. After Peter Sallis played Poirot once, Williams handed the part to John Moffatt for the remaining 25 adaptations, running to 2007; only Curtain went unmade, the BBC unable to secure rights [1]. From 1991 to 1998 she produced nearly half of Radio 4's adaptations of the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, with Clive Merrison and Michael Williams the first pair anywhere to voice the complete run [1].

The obituary dwells on physical craft: real hansom cabs with trotting ponies recorded on Edinburgh cobbles before traffic set in, and the gusting wind and howling dog of her final Hound of the Baskervilles [1]. That is the divergence worth naming. Any social tribute will name Whitfield, Moffatt and Merrison; the producer who chose them, and rehearsed the ponies, tends to vanish. Whether her work survives that erasure now depends on rebroadcasts, credits and archive listings that catalogue producers alongside stars.

-- Charles Ashford, London