April 1966. The cast included Brian Jackson as Micah Clarke, Patrick Troughton as Decimus Saxon and David Jackson as Reuben Lockarby. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part adaptation by Constance Cox and directed by David Johnstone 31 March - 3 May 1985. The cast included Martyn Read as Micah Clarke, Patrick Troughton as Decimus Saxon, James Bryce as Reuben Lockarby and Nicholas Courtney as Joseph Clarke. Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde In 1889, shortly after the publication of Micah Clarke, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde were both invited for a dinner party in London with Joseph Marshall Stoddart of the American Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. As a result of the dinner, both authors agreed to write novels to be published by Lippincott's. Conan Doyle's novel was his second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four (1890). Wilde's was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). During the dinner party the two authors chatted, and Wilde disclosed that he had read Micah Clarke and liked it. Conan Doyle mentioned the incident in his 1924 autobiography, Memories and Adventures. He explained that he and Wilde became friendly, but that the friendship remained a distant one at best, and that it grew more distant as Wilde's reputation became questionable. The actual friendly relationship appears to be true, but that Wilde liked Micah Clarke remains at issue. In the 1999 biography of Conan Doyle, Teller of Tales, author Daniel Stashower suspects that Wilde would never have liked such a novel. But Conan Doyle claimed in his autobiography that what Wilde liked was the characterization of Judge George Jeffreys in the novel. Jeffreys, the notorious bully of the law courts of his day, was shown as a handsome, brilliant man with a flaw in his character – a fallen angel type, such as figured in some of Wilde's writing. (...)It hath ever been the custom, since his [Jeffreys'] wickedness hath come to be known to all men, to picture him as a man whose expression and features were as monstrous and as hideous as was the mind behind them. This is by no means the case. On the contrary, he was a man who, in his younger days, must have been remarkable for his extreme beauty. He was not, it is true, very old, as years go, when I saw him, but debauchery and low living had left their traces upon his countenance, without, however entirely