T.S. Eliot: Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He would become a publisher, playwright, and social and literary critic. In 1914, he immigrated to England and in 1927 became a British subject. His friend Ezra Pound, another expatriate who appears in The Amateur Executioner, was instrumental in having Eliot’s classic poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published in 1915. Eliot was one of the great poets of the twentieth century, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Like most artists, his art did not make him wealthy, so he worked as a schoolteacher, a banker, and an editor. His first marriage was a famously troubled one. He died in London in 1965.
Howard Carter: Howard Carter was born on 9 May1874, in Kensington, London. His father, Samuel Carter, was a successful artist. A sickly child, Howard was sent to live with his aunts in Norfolk. He was home-schooled, and was very artistic. When his father painted a portrait of a well-known Egyptologist, the young Howard’s interest was sparked. He went to Egypt in 1891, at the age of 17, where he was to work on the Egypt Exploration Fund’s excavation of the Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hassan. For several years, Carter worked under different archaeologists at sites including Amarna, Deir el-Bahari, Thebes, Edfu and Abu Simbel. He earned praise for using innovative and modern new methods to draw wall reliefs and other findings. Carter was hired by Lord Carnarvon in 1907. In 1914, Carnarvon received a license to dig at KV62, the site where it was believed the tomb of King Tutankhamen resided. He gave Carter the job of finding it. After years of digging, a boy who worked as a water fetcher on the excavation started to dig in the sand with a stick. He found a stone step, and called Carter over. Carter’s crew found a flight of steps that led down to a sealed door and a secret chamber. On 6 November 1922, Carter and Lord Carnarvon entered the tomb, where they found an immense collection of gold and treasures. On 16 February 1923, Carter opened the innermost chamber and found the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. The immense wealth of artifacts and treasures found in Tut’s tomb took a decade to excavate. Howard Carter remained in Egypt, working on the site, until the excavation was completed in 1932.He then returned to London and spent his later years working as a collector for various museums.
Leonard Woolf: Leonard Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney, a Jewish barrister and Queen’s Counsel, and Marie (née de Jongh) Woolf. After his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St. Paul’s School (London), and in 1899 won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. In October 1904 Woolf moved to Ceylon as a government official. He returned to England in May 1911 for a year’s leave. Instead, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Adeline Virginia Stephen. As a couple, Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury Group. Leonard’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle in 1913,was based on his years in Ceylon. A series of books was to follow. As his wife began to suffer greatly from mental illness, Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her - although he also suffered with depression/mental illnesses. In 1917, the Woolfs bought a small, hand-operated printing press with which they founded the famous Hogarth Press. Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years, the Press had become a full-scale publishing house with a highly distinguished authors list. Woolf continued as its director until his death on 14 August 1969 from a stroke.
Virginia Woolf: Adeline Virginia Stephen, born 25 January 1882, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Between the great wars, she was a significant figure in London literary society and a central member of the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” She suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder. She committed suicide by drowning on 28 March 1941 at the age of 59.
Ronald A. Knox: Born on 17 February 1888, Monsignor Knox was an English priest and theologian. He was also a writer and a regular broadcaster for BBC Radio. Knox, who attended Eton College, was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912 and appointed chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford. He left Trinity in 1917 upon his conversion to Catholicism. In 1918, he was ordained a Catholic priest. In 1919, he joined the staff of St Edmund’s College, Ware, Hertfordshire, remaining there until 1926. Knox wrote many books of essays and novels. He explained his spiritual journey in two privately printed books, Apologia (1917) and A Spiritual Aeneid (1918). Directed by his religious superiors, he re-translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, using Hebrew and Greek sources, beginning in 1936.Knox wrote and broadcast on Christianity and other subjects. While Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford (1926–1939), during which he was elevated to monsignor in 1936, he wrote classic detective stories. In 1929 he codified the rules for detective stories into a tongue-in-cheek “Decalogue,” which is reprinted in this volume. He was one of the founding members of the Detection Club of London. His works of detective fiction include five novels and a short story featuring Miles Bredon, who is employed as a private investigator by the Indescribable Insurance Company. An essay in Knox’s Essays in Satire (1928), “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” was the first of the genre of mock-serious critical writings on Sherlock Holmes in which the existence of Holmes, Watson, et al., is assumed. Knox was led to the Catholic Church by the English writer G.K. Chesterton before Chesterton himself became Catholic. When Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church, he in turn was influenced by Knox, who delivered the homily for Chesterton’s requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral. He died 24 August 1957.
Sherlock Holmes: It is generally agreed that Sherlock Holmes was born 6 January 1854. William S. Baring-Gould speculated that his education was rather broad in that his family frequently traveled the Continent and he was exposed to many customs and languages. Early in his formal education he found that he had an uncanny ability to use inductive and deductive reasoning to solve problems. He decided on a career as the world’s first consulting detective. In January of 1881, Holmes was just beginning to make a name for himself. But it was his meeting with Dr. John H. Watson that month that would propel his career into the stuff of legends. In more than twenty years of active practice the team of Holmes and Watson changed the face of crime fighting. Holmes retired from the field at a still-young age and devoted himself to the keeping of bees and the occasional mystery that he could not resist. His obituary has never appeared in The Times of London.
Ronald A. Knox’s Decalogue of Detective Fiction (1929)
The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
No Chinaman must figure in the story.
No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The detective must not himself commit the crime.
The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
A Word of Thanks
&nbs
p; The authors would like to offer their special thanks for the support of the following people:
Ann Andriacco
Steve Emecz
Bob Gibson
Jeff Suess
Steve Winter
They also thank Arthur Conan Doyle for creating Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson.
About the Authors
Dan Andriacco has been reading mysteries since he discovered Sherlock Holmes at the age of nine, and writing them almost as long. His popular Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody series so far includes the books No Police Like Holmes, Holmes Sweet Holmes, The 1895 Murder, The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore, and Rogues Gallery.
A member of several scion societies of the Baker Street Irregulars since 1981, he is also the author of Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings. Follow his blog at www.danandriacco.com, his tweets at @DanAndriacco, and his Facebook Fan Page at www.facebook.com/DanAndriaccoMysteries.
Dr. Dan and his wife, Ann, have three grown children and five grandchildren. They live in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Kieran McMullen discovered Holmes and Watson at an early age. His father, a university English professor, found his reading skills lacking and so, the summer of his eighth year, assigned him the task of reading the complete Doyle stories before school started again in September.
After a twenty-two-year career in the U.S. Army, twelve years in law enforcement, and twenty years as a volunteer fireman, Kieran turned to writing about his favorite literary characters, Holmes and Watson. His first book, Watson’s Afghan Adventure, centers on Watson’s war experience before he met Holmes. His subsequent novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Boer Wagon and Sherlock Holmes and the Irish Rebels, concentrate on the duo’s wartime experiences. Sherlock Holmes and the Black Widower goes in a different and surprising direction.
Kieran lives north of Darien, Georgia, on a few acres with his Irish Wolfhounds and Percheron draft horses. He has three children and six grandchildren.
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