by David Marcum
David Friend lives in Wales, UK, where he divides his time between watching old detective films and thinking about old detective films. He’s been scribbling out stories for twenty years and hopes, some day, to write something half-decent. Most of what he pens is set in a 1930’s world of non-stop adventure with debonair sleuths, kick-ass damsels, criminal masterminds, and narrow escapes, and he wishes he could live there. He’s currently working on a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and a series based around The Strange Investigators, an eccentric team of private detectives out to solve the most peculiar and perplexing mysteries around. He thinks of it as P.G. Wodehouse crossed with Edgar Allen Poe, only not as good.
Wendy C. Fries is the author of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson: The Day They Met and also writes under the name Atlin Merrick. Wendy is fascinated with London theatre, scriptwriting, and lattes. Her website is wendycfries.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-nine 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 finished Sherlock Holmes: The Four Handed Game, to be published 2017, and is now working on his next novel.
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, most have been published solely in electronic format, including two non-Holmes novels (The Oxford Deception and The Anger of Achilles Peterson). He recently released paperback editions of many of his Sherlock Holmes works, previously only available in electronic versions, including: the short trilogy The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes; Light In the Darkness, containing the four adventures previously collected as The Midwinter Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and the four stories from The First of Criminals; and a Watsonian novel entitled The Isle of Devils. Craig Janacek is a nom de plume.
Christopher James was born in 1975 in Paisley, Scotland. Educated at Newcastle and UEA, he was a winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition in 2008. He has written two full length Sherlock Holmes novels, The Adventure of the Ruby Elephant and The Jeweller of Florence, both published by MX, and is working on a third.
Andrew Lane is a British writer with thirty-odd books to his credit, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, adult and 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.
Michael Mallory is the Derringer-winning author of the “Amelia Watson” (The Second Mrs. Watson) series and “Dave Beauchamp” mystery series, and more than one-hundred-twenty-five short stories. An entertainment journalist by day, he has written eight nonfiction books on pop culture and more than six-hundred newspaper and magazine articles. Based in Los Angeles, Mike is also an occasional actor on television.
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, including 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.
William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty novels published in the genre press and more than three-hundred short story credits in thirteen countries. He has several Sherlock Holmes books available from Dark Regions Press and Gryphonwood Press, and his Holmes pastiches have appeared in a number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles, and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing, he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.
Will Murray is the author of over seventy novels, including forty Destroyer novels and seven posthumous Doc Savage collaborations with Lester Dent, under the name Kenneth Robeson, for Bantam Books in the 1990’s. Since 2011, he has written fourteen additional Doc Savage adventures for Altus Press, two of which co-starred The Shadow, as well as a solo Pat Savage novel. His 2015 Tarzan novel, Return to Pal-Ul-Don, was followed by King Kong vs. Tarzan in 2016. Murray has written short stories featuring such classic characters as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, the Hulk, Honey West, the Spider, the Avenger, the Green Hornet, the Phantom, and Cthulhu. A previous Murray Sherlock Holmes story appeared in Moonstone’s Sherlock Holmes: The Crossovers Casebook, and another is forthcoming in Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not, involving H. P. Lovecraft’s Dr. Herbert West.
Robert Perret is a writer, librarian, and devout Sherlockian living on the Palouse. His Sherlockian publications include “The Canaries of Clee Hills Mine” in An Improbable Truth: The Paranormal Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “For King and Country” in The Science of Deduction, and “How Hope Learned the Trick” in NonBinary Review. He considers hims
elf to be a pan-Sherlockian and a one-man Scion out on the lonely moors of Idaho. Robert has recently authored a yet-unpublished scholarly article tentatively entitled “A Study in Scholarship: The Case of the Baker Street Journal’. More information is available at www.robertperret.com
Tracy J. Revels, a Sherlockian from the age of eleven, is a professor of history at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She is a member of The Survivors of the Gloria Scott and The Studious Scarlets Society, and is a past recipient of the Beacon Society Award. Almost every semester, she teaches a class that covers The Canon, either to college students or to senior citizens. She is also the author of three supernatural Sherlockian pastiches with MX (Shadowfall, Shadowblood, and Shadowwraith), and a regular contributor to her scion’s newsletter. She also has some notoriety as an author of very silly skits: For proof, see “The Adventure of the Adversarial Adventuress” and “Occupy Baker Street” on YouTube. When not studying Sherlock Holmes, she can be found researching the history of her native state, and has written books on Florida in the Civil War and on the development of Florida’s tourism industry.
Roger Riccard of Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., is a descendant of the Roses of Kilravock in Highland Scotland. He is the author of two previous Sherlock Holmes novels, The Case of the Poisoned Lilly and The Case of the Twain Papers, as well as a series of short stories in two volumes, Sherlock Holmes: Adventures for the Twelve Days of Christmas and Further Adventures for the Twelve Days of Christmas, all of which are published by Baker Street Studios. He has another novel, a new series of short stories, and a non-fiction Holmes reference work in various stages of completion. He became a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast as a teenager (many, many years ago,) and, like all fans of The Great Detective, yearned for more stories after reading The Canon over and over. It was the Granada Television performances of Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke, and the encouragement of his wife, Rosilyn, that at last inspired him to write his own Holmes adventures, using the Granada actor portrayals as his guide. He has been called “The best pastiche writer since Val Andrews” by the Sherlockian E-Times.
David Ruffle was born in Northamptonshire in England a long, long time ago. He has lived in the beautiful town of Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast for the last twelve years. His first foray into writing was the 2009 self-published, Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Horror. This was swiftly followed by two more Holmes novellas set in Lyme, and a Holmes children’s book, Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Snowman. Since then, there has been four further Holmes novellas, including the critically acclaimed End Peace, three contemporary comedies, and a slim volume detailing the life of Jack the Ripper. When not writing, he can be found working in a local shop, “acting” in local productions, and occasionally performing poetry locally. To come next year is Sherlock Holmes and the Scarborough Affair, a collaboration with Gill Stammers, in which David is very much the junior partner.
At the age of ten, Aaron Smith walked in on his father watching an episode of the Jeremy Brett series of Sherlock Holmes dramatizations. He was fascinated by the intensity of the character on screen and the mystery that had to be solved. Two decades later, Smith was thrilled to have, as his very first published work, “The Massachusetts Affair,” in Airship 27 Productions’ Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Volume 1. Since then, Smith has contributed eight Holmes mysteries to that anthology series, seven of which were collected into a Kindle edition in 2016. His other Holmes-related work includes the Doctor Watson novel Season of Madness and a Holmes/Van Helsing crossover. “The Cocoon of His Dreams,” as part of 18th Wall Productions’ The Science of Deduction series. He can be followed on Twitter as @AaronSmith377
Sandor Jay Sonnen is a crime writer who taught government and history for twenty-five years in Los Angeles. After retiring, he found the time to begin writing mysteries and hasn’t stopped. He has written a novel featuring a detective thrown into having to solve a murder, aided by his sort of competent attorney. Who Can Impress The Forest introduces Anhur Lennox, forced to prove his innocence, concerned in the death of his wife, by finding the real killer, while his lawyer works to help him by drinking vodka, smoking cigars, and avoiding the wrath of his wife, secretary, and the F.B.I. He has also written three short stories featuring two graduate students who run around southern California solving puzzles and finding treasure while surrounded by the crazy people who are their friends. This series, There Was A Star Danced, introduces Ridge Wesley and Jennifer Gayle, who aren’t certain why they are placed in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Yet they uncover clues and figure out where things are and manage to stay half-a-step ahead of the authorities. For now. Sandor especially enjoys writing Sherlock Holmes stories, those that are alluded to by Dr. John Watson in the Doyle stories, but ones Watson never got around to writing and publishing. He lives and works in Palos Verdes, California. His e-mail address is [email protected].
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 Nine Dragon Sigil. Previous novels include Sherlock Holmes and The Sword Of Osman, 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.
Marcia Wilson is a freelance researcher and illustrator who likes to work in a style compatible for the color blind and visually impaired. She is Canon-centric, and her first MX offering, You Buy Bones, uses the point-of-view of Scotland Yard to show the unique talents of Dr. Watson. This continued with the publication of Test of the Professionals: The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon. She can be contacted at: gravelgirty.deviantart.com
Available from MX Publishing
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
Edited by David Marcum
Part I: 1881-1889
Part II: 1890-1895
Part III: 1896-1929
Part IV: 2016 Annual
Part V: Christmas Adventures
Part VI: 2017 Annual
Part VII: Eliminate the Impossible - 1880-1891
Part VIII: Eliminate the Impossible - 1892-1905
In Preparation
Part IX - 2018 Annual
Part X - Some Untold Cases
...and more to come!
“This is the finest volume of Sherlockian fiction I have ever read, and I have read, literally, thousands.”
– Philip K. Jones
“Beyond Impressive... This is a splendid venture for a great cause!
– Roger Johnson, Editor, The Sherlock Holmes Journal, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London
MX Publishing is the world’s largest specialist Sherlock Holmes publisher, with several hundred titles and authors creating the latest in Sherlock Holmes fiction and non-fiction.
From traditional short stories and novels to travel guides and quiz books, MX Publishing caters to all Holmes fans.
The collection includes leading titles such as Benedict Cumberbatch In Transition and The Norwood Author, which won the 2011 Tony Howlett Award (Sherlock Holmes Book of the Year).
MX Publishing also has one of the largest communities of Holmes fans on Facebook, with regular contributions from dozens of authors.
www.mxpublishing.co.uk (UK)
and
www.mxpublishing.com (USA)
of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VII