The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part IV

by David Marcum

Hugh Ashton was born in the UK, and moved to Japan in 1988, where he has remained since then, living with his wife Yoshiko in the historic city of Kamakura, a little to the south of Yokohama. In the past, he has worked in the technology and financial services industries, which have provided him with material for some of his books set in the 21st century. He currently works as a writer: novelist, copywriter (his work for large Japanese corporations appears in international business journals), and journalist, as well as producing industry reports on various aspects of the financial services industry. Recently, however, his lifelong interest in Sherlock Holmes has developed into an acclaimed series of adventures featuring the world’s most famous detective, written in the style of the originals, and published by Inknbeans Press. In addition to these, he has also published historical and alternate historical novels, short stories, and thrillers. Together with artist Andy Boerger, he has produced the Sherlock Ferret series of stories for children, featuring the world’s cutest detective.

  Deanna Baran lives in a remote part of Texas where cowboys may still be seen in their natural habitat. A librarian and former museum curator, she writes in between cups of tea, playing Go, and trading postcards with people around the world. This is her first venture into the foggy streets of gaslit London.

  Derrick Belanger is an author and educator most noted for his books and lectures on Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as his writing for the blog I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. Both volumes of his two-volume anthology, A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural were #1 best sellers on the Amazon.com UK Sherlock Holmes book list, and his MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes chapter book, Attack of the Violet Vampire! was also a #1 bestselling new release in the U.K. His novella, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Peculiar Provenance, is available from Endeavour Press. Mr. Belanger’s academic work has been published in The Colorado Reading Journal and Gifted Child Today. Find him at www.belangerbooks.com.

  Matthew Booth is the author of Sherlock Holmes and the Giant’s Hand, a collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories published by Breese Books. He is a scriptwriter for the American radio network Imagination Theatre, syndicated by Jim French Productions, contributing particularly to their series, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Matthew has contributed two original stories to The Game Is Afoot, a collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories published in 2008 by Wordsworth Editions. His contributions are “The Tragedy of Saxon’s Gate” and “The Dragon of Lea Lane”. He has provided an original story entitled “A Darkness Discovered”, featuring his own creation, Manchester-based private detective John Dakin, for the short story collection Crime Scenes, also published by Wordsworth Editions in 2008. Matthew is currently working on a supernatural novel called The Ravenfirth Horror.

  Bob Byrne was a columnist for Sherlock Magazine and has contributed to Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes short story collection Curious Incidents. He publishes two free online newsletters: Baker Street Essays and The Solar Pons Gazette, both of which can be found at www.SolarPons.com, the only website dedicated to August Derleth’s successor to the great detective. Bob’s column, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes, appears every Monday morning at www.BlackGate.com and explores Holmes, hard boiled, and other mystery matters, and whatever other topics come to mind by the deadline. His mystery-themed blog is Almost Holmes.

  J.R. Campbell is a Calgary-based writer who always enjoys setting problems before the Great Detective. Along with his steadfast friend Charles Prepolec, he has co-edited the Sherlock Holmes anthologies Curious Incidents, Curious Incidents 2, Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Takes of Sherlock Holmes, and Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes. He has also contributed stories to Imagination Theater’s Radio Drama The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the anthologies A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes and Challenger Unbound. At the time of writing, his latest project, again with Charles Prepolec, is the anthology Professor Challenger: New Worlds, Lost Places.

  David Stuart Davies BSI is a long time Sherlockian. He is a member of Sherlock Holmes Society of London and an invested Baker Street Irregular. He is a writer and editor and author of six Sherlock Holmes novels, including Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Promise (Titan) and the forthcoming The Ripper Legacy (Titan), and two books on the films of the Great Detective. He has also penned two plays about Holmes, and Bending the Willow, a volume about Jeremy Brett playing Sherlock. David is a member of the national committee of the Crime Writer’s Association and edits their monthly magazine, Red Herrings. He has edited various collections of mystery and supernatural fiction, and is the author of two crime series: one set in the Second World War featuring the detective Johnny One Eye, and another based in Yorkshire in the 1980’s with DI Paul Snow. The latest novel in this series is Innocent Blood (Mystery Press).

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) Holmes Chronicler Emeritus. If not for him, this anthology would not exist. Author, physician, patriot, sportsman, spiritualist, husband and father, and advocate for the oppressed. He is remembered and honored for the purposes of this collection by being the man who introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Through fifty-six Holmes short stories, four novels, and additional Apocryphal entries, Doyle revolutionized mystery stories and also greatly influenced and improved police forensic methods and techniques for the betterment of all. Steel True Blade Straight.

  Richard Doyle is a great nephew of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He runs a small IT company and is a director of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., a company formed by family members to manage their remaining Conan Doyle rights and interests. As much as he enjoys the fictional adventures brought to life by Great Uncle Arthur, it is not always possible to enjoy the real life highs and lows that go along with being a Conan Doyle family member. However, Richard was very pleased to have once been described by Anthony Horowitz as “Normal People”. He lives with his wife, Jane, and their two sons near Winchester, close to the New Forest and not too far from Undershaw.

  Steve Emecz’s main field is technology, in which he has been working for about twenty years. Following multiple senior roles at Xerox, where he grew their European eCommerce from $6m to $200m, Steve joined platform provider Venda, and moved across to Powa Technologies in 2010. Steve is a regular trade show speaker on the subject of mobile commerce, and his time at Powa has taken him to more than forty countries - so he’s no stranger to planes and airports. He wrote two novels (one bestseller) in the 1990’s, and a screenplay in 2001. Shortly after he set up MX Publishing, specialising in NLP books. In 2008, MX published its first Sherlock Holmes book, and MX has gone on to become the largest specialist Holmes publisher in the world, with over one hundred authors and over two hundred books. Profits from MX go towards his second passion - a children’s rescue project in Nairobi, Kenya, where he and his wife, Sharon, spend every Christmas at the rescue centre in Kasarani. In 2014, they wrote a short book about the project, The Happy Life Story.

  Melissa Farnham, Head Teacher of Stepping Stones School, is driven by a passion to open the doors to learners with complex and layered special needs that just make society feel two steps too far away. Based on the Surrey/Hampshire border in England, her time is spent between relocating a great school into the prestigious home of Conan Doyle, and her two children, dogs, and horses, so there never a dull moment.

  Mark A. Gagen BSI is co-founder of Wessex Press, sponsor of the popular From Gillette to Brett conferences, and publisher of The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library and many other fine Sherlockian titles. A life-long Holmes enthusiast, he is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars and The Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis. A graphic artist by profession, his work is often seen on the covers of The Baker Street Journal and various BSI books.

  Jayantika Ganguly BSI is the General Secretary and Editor of the Sherlock Holmes Society of India
, a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and the Czech Sherlock Holmes Society. She is the author of The Holmes Sutra (MX 2014). She is a corporate lawyer working with one of the Big Six law firms.

  Bob Gibson, graphic designer, was the Director at Staunch Design, located in Oxford, England. In addition to designing the covers for MX Book publications, Staunch also provided identity design and brand development for small and medium sized companies through print and web for a wide range of clients, including independent schools, retail, financial services and the health sector. Sadly, he passed away during the final production of this book and will be greatly missed.

  John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893) was born in Leeds, England. His amazing paintings, usually featuring twilight or night scenes illuminated by gas-lamps or moonlight, are easily recognizable, and are often used on the covers of books about the Great Detective to set the mood, as shadowy figures move in the distance through misty mysterious settings and over rain-slicked streets.

  Arthur Hall was born in Aston, Birmingham, UK, in 1944. He discovered his interest in writing during his schooldays, along with a love of fictional adventure and suspense. His first novel, Sole Contact, was an espionage story about an ultra-secret government department known as “Sector Three”, and was followed, to date, by three sequels. Other works include three Sherlock Holmes novels, The Demon of the Dusk, The One Hundred Percent Society, and The Secret Assassin, as well as a collection of short stories, and a modern detective novel. He lives in the West Midlands, United Kingdom.

  Jeremy Holstein first discovered Sherlock Holmes at age five when he became convinced that the Hound of the Baskervilles lived in his bedroom closet. A life long enthusiast of radio dramas, Jeremy is currently the lead dramatist and director for the Post Meridian Radio Players adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, where he has adapted The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of Four, and “Jack the Harlot Killer” (retitled “The Whitechapel Murders”) from William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street for the company. Jeremy has also written Sherlock Holmes scripts for Jim French’s Imagination Theatre. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Boston, MA area.

  In the year 1998 Craig Janacek took his degree of Doctor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University, and proceeded to Stanford to go through the training prescribed for pediatricians in practice. Having completed his studies there, he was duly attached to the University of California, San Francisco as Associate Professor. The author of over seventy medical monographs upon a variety of obscure lesions, his travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of his fictional works. To date, these have been published solely in electronic format, including two non-Holmes novels (The Oxford Deception and The Anger of Achilles Peterson), the trio of holiday adventures collected as The Midwinter Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, and a Watsonian novel entitled The Isle of Devils. His next project is the short trilogy The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes. Craig Janacek is a nom de plume.

  Roger Johnson BSI is a retired librarian, now working as a volunteer assistant at the Essex Police Museum. In his spare time, he is commissioning editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, an occasional lecturer, and a frequent contributor to the Writings About the Writings. His sole work of Holmesian pastiche was published in 1997 in Mike Ashley’s anthology The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and he has the greatest respect for the many authors who have contributed new tales to the present mighty trilogy. Like his wife, Jean Upton, he is a member of both The Baker Street Irregulars and The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes.

  Andrew Lane is a British writer with thirty-odd books to his credit, a mixture of fiction & non-fiction, Adult & Young Adult, and books under his own name and ghost-written works. Most recently he has written eight books in a series (sold in translation to more than twenty countries at the last count) imagining what Sherlock Holmes would have been like when he was fourteen years old. A Study in Scarlet was the first book that Andrew Lane bought with his own pocket money. He was nine years old at the time, and the purchase warped his life from that moment on.

  Arlene Mantin Levy RN retired to Colorado in 2015. She practiced as a Critical Care/Trauma Specialist for thirty-eight years in Miami, Florida. During the last four years in Florida, she was a member of the scion Tropical Deerstalkers, and since moving to Evergreen, she and husband Mark are members of the scion Dr. Watson’s Neglected Patients.

  Bonnie MacBird has loved Sherlock Holmes since breathlessly devouring the Canon at ten. She has degrees in music and film from Stanford, is the original writer of the movie TRON, won three Emmys for documentary film, studied Shakespearean acting at Oxford, and divides her time between her home in Los Angeles and a hotel room in Baker Street. She runs The Sherlock Breakfast Club and a playreading series in Los Angeles, where she also teaches writing at UCLA Extension. Her Sherlockian first novel, Art in the Blood (HarperCollins 2015) deals with kidnapping, murder, and an art theft, and challenges Holmes’s artistic nature and his friendship with Watson to the limits. She’s at work on book two of her Holmes trilogy for HarperCollins, Unquiet Spirits, about ghosts and the whisky business, to be released in 2017.

  David Marcum first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975, at the age of ten, when he received an abridged version of The Adventures during a trade. Since that time, David has collected literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes Vol.’s I and II (2011, 2013), Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt (2013) and Sherlock Holmes - Tangled Skeins (2015). Additionally, he is the editor of the three-volume set Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street (2014, recasting Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt stories as early Holmes adventures,) and most recently this ongoing anthology collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015- ). He has contributed essays and stories to the Baker Street Journal, The Solar Pons Gazette, and The Gazette, the journal of the Nero Wolfe Wolfe Pack. He began his adult work life as a Federal Investigator for an obscure U.S. Government agency, before the organization was eliminated. He then returned to school for a second degree, and is now a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. He is a member of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, The John H. Watson Society (“Marker”), The Occupants of the Full House (a BSI Scion), The Praed Street Irregulars (“The Obrisset Snuff Box”), The Solar Pons Society of London, and The Diogenes Club West (East Tennessee Annex), a curious and unofficial Scion of one. Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat from autumn to spring. In 2013 and 2015, he and his deerstalker were finally able make trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimages to England, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

  Daniel McGachey Outside of his day job - which, over the past quarter century has seen him write extensively for comics, newspapers, magazines, digital media, and animation - Scottish writer Daniel McGachey’s stories first appeared in several volumes of The BHF Book of Horror Stories and Black Book of Horror anthology series, and Filthy Creations magazine. In 2009, Dark Regions Press published his first ghost story collection, They That Dwell in Dark Places, dedicated in part to M.R. James, whose works inspired the creation of the collected stories. Since 2005, he has reviewed television and radio adaptations of James’s stories for The Ghosts and Scholars M.R. James Newsletter, while his sequels to several of James’s original tales appeared as the Haunted Library publication Ex Libris: Lufford in 2012. Moving from M.R. James to his other lifelong literary hero, his 2010 Dark Regions Press collection pitted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s rational detective against the irrational forces of the supernatural in Sherlock Holmes: The Impossible Cases. His radio plays have been broadcast since 2005 as part of the mystery and suspense series Imagination Theater, includ
ing entries in its long-running strand of new Holmesian mysteries, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He recently completed a new “impossible case” for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the novel, The Curse of the Devil’s Crown for Dark Renaissance Press.

  Mark Mower is a crime writer and historian, and a member of the Crime Writers’ Association. His books include Bloody British History: Norwich (The History Press, 2014) and Suffolk Murders (The History Press, 2011). His first book, Suffolk Tales of Mystery & Murder (Countryside Books, 2006), contained a potent blend of tales from the seamier side of country life - described by the East Anglian Daily Times Suffolk magazine as “... a good serving of grisliness, a strong flavour of the unusual, a seasoning of ghoulishness and just a hint of the unexpected...” Alongside his writing, Mark lectures on crime history and runs a murder mystery business.

  Sidney Paget (1860-1908), a few of whose illustrations are used within this anthology, was born in London, and like his two older brothers, became a famed illustrator and painter. He completed over three-hundred-and-fifty drawings for the Sherlock Holmes stories first published in The Strand magazine, defining Holmes’s image forever after in the public mind.

  Steven Rothman BSI, has been the editor of The Baker Street Journal since 2000. He edited The Standard Doyle Company: Christopher Morley on Sherlock Holmes (1990) and “A Remarkable Mixture”: Award-Winning Articles from The Baker Street Journal (2008). Other publications include To Keep the Memory Green: Reflections on the Life of Richard Lancelyn Green 1953–2004 (2007, co-edited with Nicholas Utechin), and Out of the Abyss: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript of “The Empty House” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014, co-edited with Robert Katz and Andrew Solberg). He is invested in the Baker Street Irregulars as “The Valley of Fear.”

  Denis O. Smith’s first published story of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, “The Adventure of The Purple Hand”, appeared in 1982. Since then, numerous other such accounts have been published in magazines and anthologies both in the U.K. and the U.S. In the 1990’s, four volumes of his stories were published under the general title of The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, and, more recently, a dozen of his stories, most not previously published in book form, appeared as The Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (2014), and he wrote a new story for the anthology, Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015). His latest work is the forthcoming The New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. Born in Yorkshire, in the north of England, Denis Smith has lived and worked in various parts of the country, including London, and has now been resident in Norfolk for many years. His interests range widely, but apart from his dedication to the career of Sherlock Holmes, he has a passion for historical mysteries of all kinds, the railways of Britain and the history of London.