by David Marcum
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.
Bob Gibson, graphic designer, is the Director at Staunch Design, located in Oxford, England. In addition to designing the covers for MX Book publications, Staunch also provides 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. www.staunch.com
Paul D. Gilbert was born in 1954 and has lived in and around Lindon all of his life. He has been married to Jackie for thirty-eight years, and she is a Holmes expert who keeps him on the straight and narrow! He has two sons, one of whom now lives in Spain. His interests include literature, ancient history, all religions, most sports, and movies. He is currently employed full-time as a funeral director. His books so far include The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes (2007), The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (2008), Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra (2010), The Annals of Sherlock Holmes (2012), and Sherlock Holmes and the Unholy Trinity (2015). He has just started work on Sherlock Holmes: The Four Handed Game.
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.
Phil Growick has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since he watched a black and white Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce on his grandparents’ TV when he was five. His first Holmes novel was The Secret Journal of Dr. Watson. It has a surprise ending that no one, as yet, expected, and left everyone demanding to know what happened to all the major characters; primarily, of course, Holmes. Ergo, he wrote the sequel, The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes, which answered all the questions the readers of the first book were asking. His greatest joys are his wife, his sons, his daughters-in-law, and his grandsons.
Roger Johnson BSI is a retired librarian, now working as a volunteer assistant at 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.
Kim Krisco, author of three books on leadership, now follows in the footsteps of the master storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by adding five totally new Sherlock Holmes adventures to the canon with the recently released Sherlock Holmes - The Golden Years. He captures the voice and style of Doyle, as Holmes and Watson find themselves unraveling mysteries in America, Africa and around turn-of-the-century London that, as Holmes puts it, “appears to have taken on an unsavory European influence.” Meticulously researched, all of Krisco’s stories read as mini historical novels. Indeed, he traveled to the UK and Scotland in May of 2013 to do research for his most recent book. The five novellas all take place after Holmes and Watson were supposed to have retired. Sherlock Holmes - The Golden Years breathes new life into the beloved “odd couple,” revealing deeper insights into their protean friendship that has become richer with age... and a bit puckish. Krisco’s diverse career fashioned a circuitous route to his becoming a full-time writer. He has taught college, written and directed TV and films, and served in corporate communications. He has two writing desks: one in a travel trailer on a river in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and the other in a pequeña casa on an estuary in La Penta, Mexico.
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. The third of these books, Black Ice, is referenced in passing in his story for this anthology. 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.
James Lovegrove is the author of more than fifty books, including The Hope, Days, Untied Kingdom, Provender Gleed, the New York Times bestselling Pantheon series, the Redlaw novels, and the Dev Harmer Missions. He has produced three Sherlock Holmes novels, with a Holmes/Cthulhu mashup trilogy in the works. He has also sold well over forty short stories and published two collections, Imagined Slights and Diversifications. He has produced a dozen short books for readers with reading difficulties, and a four-volume fantasy saga for teenagers, The Clouded World, under the pseudonym Jay Amory. James has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, and the Manchester Book Award. His short story “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages, and his journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as Literary Review, Interzone and BBC MindGames. He reviews fiction regularly for the Financial Times. He lives with his wife, two sons, cat, and tiny dog in Eastbourne, not far from the site of the “small farm upon the South Downs” to which Sherlock Holmes retired.
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 first novel, Art in the Blood (HarperCollins 2015) features a kidnapping, murder, and an art theft, and challenges Holmes’s artistic nature and his friendship with Watson to the limits.
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 current collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015). He has contributed essays to the Baker Street Journal 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 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 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, he and hi
s deerstalker were finally able make a trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage 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!
Lyn McConchie began writing professionally in 1990. Since then, she has seen thirty-two of her books published, and almost three hundred of her short stories appear. Her work has been published to date in nine countries and four languages, which she says isn’t bad for an elderly, crippled, female farmer. Lyn lives on her farm in the North island of New Zealand where she breeds coloured sheep, and has free-range geese and hens. She shares her 19th century farmhouse with her Ocicat, Thunder, 7,469 books by other authors, and says that she plans to write forever or die trying.
Iain McLaughlin has been writing for a living since 1985. He has worked on numerous comics in the UK, and was editor of the Beano for a time. He has written novels, short stories, radio plays, and some TV episodes, often working with regular writing partner Claire Bartlett. He wrote several stories in the “Doctor Who” universe, beginning with 2001’s The Eye of the Scorpion, which introduced the character of Erimem. He has also written audios for Blake’s 7, and radio plays of legendary sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Additionally, he has written numerous horror radio plays, and created and wrote every episode of Imagination Theater’s Kerides The Thinker radio series. His noir novel, Movie Star, was released by Thebes Publishing in 2015. He was born and still lives in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland.
Larry Millett worked for thirty years as a newspaper reporter in St. Paul, where he lives, while building a parallel career as a mystery novelist and architectural historian. He has written seven mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes, all but one of them set in Minnesota. His first novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon, appeared in 1996. His second novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders, was adapted in 2015 into a play that performed to full houses at a theater in St. Paul. He is now working on a new mystery featuring Holmes that will be published in 2016 by the University of Minnesota Press.
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.
GC Rosenquist was born in Chicago, Illinois, and has been writing since he was ten years old. His interests are very eclectic. His eleven previously published books include literary fiction, horror, poetry, a comedic memoir, and lots of science fiction. His latest published work for MX Books is Sherlock Holmes: The Pearl of Death and Other Stories (2015). He works professionally as a graphic artist. He has studied writing and poetry at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois, and currently resides in Lindenhurst, Illinois. For more information on GC Rosenquist, you can go to his website at www.gcrosenquist.com.
Geri Schear is a novelist and short story writer. Her work has been published in literary journals in the U.S. and Ireland. Her first novel, A Biased Judgement: The Diaries of Sherlock Holmes 1897 was released to critical acclaim in 2014. The sequel, Sherlock Holmes and the Other Woman, will be released by MX Publishing in November 2015. She lives in Kells, Ireland.
Carolyn and Joel Senter (“Those Sherlock Holmes People in Cincinnati”) were the founders of Classic Specialties, which they operated for more than a quarter century, as “North America’s leading purveyor of items appertaining to Mr. Sherlock Holmes and His Times.” After retiring Classic Specialties in 2014, the Senters have maintained their contact with The Sherlockian Community via membership in several scions and Sherlockian societies, continued participation in numerous Sherlockian gatherings and, primarily, through their monthly (almost) internet newsletter, The Sherlockian E-Times. Their previous contributions to the world of Sherlockian printed literature have included the compiling and editing of The Formidable Scrap-Book of Baker Street, the publication of three full-length Sherlockian books, and the authoring of articles for various Sherlockian periodicals.
Tim Symonds was born in London. He grew up in Somerset, Dorset, and Guernsey. After several years in East and Central Africa, he settled in California and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Political Science from UCLA. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He writes his novels in the woods and hidden valleys surrounding his home in the High Weald of East Sussex. Dr. Watson knew the untamed region well. In “The Adventure of Black Peter”, Watson wrote, “the Weald was once part of that great forest which for so long held the Saxon invaders at bay.” Tim’s novels are published by MX Publishing. His latest is titled Sherlock Holmes and The Sword Of Osman. Previous novels include Sherlock Holmes and The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter, Sherlock Holmes and The Dead Boer At Scotney Castle, and Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex.
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