The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part XI
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Thomas Fortenberry is an American author, editor, and reviewer. Founder of Mind Fire Press and a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, he has also judged many literary contests, including the Georgia Author of the Year Awards and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. His Sherlock Holmes stories have appeared in An Improbable Truth, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VIII: Eliminate the Impossible (1892-1905), and the forthcoming MX collection Some Untold Cases.
James R. “Jim” French became a morning Disc Jockey on KIRO (AM) in Seattle in 1959. He later founded Imagination Theatre, a syndicated program that broadcast to over one-hundred-and-twenty stations in the U.S. and Canada, and also on the XM Satellite Radio system all over North America. Actors in French’s dramas included John Patrick Lowrie, Larry Albert, Patty Duke, Russell Johnson, Tom Smothers, Keenan Wynn, Roddy MacDowall, Ruta Lee, John Astin, Cynthia Lauren Tewes, and Richard Sanders. Mr. French stated, “To me, the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson always seemed to be figures Doyle created as a challenge to lesser writers. He gave us two interesting characters - different from each other in their histories, talents, and experience, but complimentary as a team - who have been applied to a variety of situations and plots far beyond the times and places in The Canon. In the hands of different writers, Holmes and Watson have lent their identities to different times, ages, and even genders. But I wanted to break no new ground. I feel Sir Arthur provided us with enough references to locations, landmarks, and the social conditions of his time, to give a pretty large canvas on which to paint our own images and actions to animate Holmes and Watson.” Mr. French passed away at the age of eight-nine on December 20th, 2017, the day that his contribution to this book was being edited. He shall be missed.
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.
John Linwood Grant is a writer and editor who lives in Yorkshire with a pack of lurchers and a beard. He may also have a family. He focuses particularly on dark Victorian and Edwardian fiction, such as his recent novella A Study in Grey, which also features Holmes. Current projects include his Tales of the Last Edwardian series, about psychic and psychiatric mysteries, and curating a collection of new stories based on the darker side of the British Empire. He has been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, with stories range from madness in early Virginia to questions about the monsters we ourselves might be. He is also co-editor of Occult Detective Quarterly. His website greydogtales.com explores weird fiction, especially period ones, weird art, and even weirder lurchers.
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 four Sherlock Holmes novels, The Demon of the Dusk, The One Hundred Percent Society, The Secret Assassin, and The Phantom Killer, as well as a collection of short stories, and a modern detective novel. He lives in the West Midlands, United Kingdom.
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, the Holmes story collections The First of Criminals, The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes, The Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, and the Watsonian novels The Isle of Devils and The Gate of Gold. Craig Janacek is a nom de plume.
Nik Morton hails from the northeast of England and has lived in Spain with his linguist-musician wife Jennifer for the last fifteen years. He served in the Royal Navy for twenty-three years and has been writing for fifty-three years. He sold his first story in 1971 and has had 120 short stories published - some winning awards - in several genres such as action, adventure, romance, ghost, horror, sci-fi, western and crime. To date, six collections of his short stories have been collected and published, the latest being Leon Cazador, P.I. His Sherlock Holmes pastiche ‘The Very First Detective: The Killing Stone’ is published in the October 2018 issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine. He has edited periodicals and contributed hundreds of articles, book and film reviews to magazines. He has chaired several writers’ circles and run writing and screenplay workshops, and judged competitions. He has edited many books, and for the period 2003-2007 he was sub-editor of the monthly colour magazine, Portsmouth Post, and for 2011-2013 he was Editor-in-Chief of a U.S. publisher but stepped down to spend more time on his various writing projects. Since 2007, he’s had thirty books published, among them the psychic spy series: Mission: Prague, Mission: Tehran, and Mission: Khyber, a modern vampire thriller set in Malta, Chill of the Shadow, a Sister Rose thriller, The Bread of Tears, and a romantic thriller set in Tenerife, An Evil Trade. His latest books are a sci-fi time-travel adventure, Continuity Girl, a noir western/homage to Edgar Allan Poe, Coffin for Cash, and the third in a fantasy series (co-written under the pen-name Morton Faulkner), Floreskand: Madurava. His guide Write a Western in 30 Days - with Plenty of Bullet Points is a best-seller and has reviewers recommending it for writers of all genres, not just westerns. To learn more about Nik follow him on twitter https://twitter.com/nik_morton or read his regular blog posts, http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.
Mark Mower is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and The Solar Pons Society of London. He writes true crime stories and fictional mysteries. His first two volumes of Holmes pastiches were entitled A Farewell to Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes: The Baker Street Case-Files (both with MX Publishing) and, to date, he has contributed chapters to six parts of the ongoing The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. He has also had stories in two anthologies by Belanger Books: Holmes Away From Home: Adventures from the Great Hiatus - Volume II - 1893-1894 (2016) and Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street (2017). More are bound to follow. Mark’s non-fiction works include Bloody British History: Norwich (The History Press, 2014), Suffolk Murders (The History Press, 2011) and Zeppelin Over Suffolk (Pen & Sword Books, 2008).
Jane Rubino is the author of A Jersey Shore mystery series, featuring a Jane Austen-loving amateur sleuth and a Sherlock Holmes-quoting detective; Knight Errant, Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, (a novel-length adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, co-authored with her daughter Caitlen Rubino-Bradway, What Would Austen Do?, also co-authored with her daughter, a short story in the anthology Jane Austen Made Me Do It, The Rucastles’ Pawn, The Copper Beeches from Violet Turner’s POV, and, of course, there’s the Sherlockian novel in the drawer - who doesn’t have one? Jane lives on a barrier island at the New Jersey shore.
Robert V. Stapleton was born and brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, and studied at Durham University. After working in various parts of the country as an Angl
ican parish priest, he is now retired and lives with his wife in North Yorkshire. As a member of his local writing group, he now has time to develop his other life as a writer of adventure stories. He has recently had a number of short stories published, and he is hoping to have a couple of completed novels published at some time in the future.
S. Subramanian is a retired professor of Economics from Chennai, India. Apart from a small book titled Economic Offences: A Compendium of Crimes in Prose and Verse (Oxford University Press Delhi, 2012), his Holmes pastiches are the only serious things he has written. His other work runs largely to whimsical stuff on fuzzy logic and social measurement, on which he writes with much precision and little understanding, being an economist. He is otherwise mainly harmless, as his wife and daughter might concede with a little persuasion.
Daniel D. Victor, a Ph.D. in American literature, is a retired high school English teacher who taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for forty-six years. His doctoral dissertation on little-known American author, David Graham Phillips, led to the creation of Victor’s first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Seventh Bullet, in which Holmes investigates Phillips’ actual murder. Victor’s second novel, A Study in Synchronicity, is a two-stranded murder mystery, which features a Sherlock Holmes-like private eye. He currently writes the ongoing series Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati. Each novel introduces Holmes to a different American author who actually passed through London at the turn of the century. In The Final Page of Baker Street, Holmes meets Raymond Chandler; in The Baron of Brede Place, Stephen Crane; in Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street, Mark Twain; and in The Outrage at the Diogenes Club, Jack London. His most recent novel is Sherlock Holmes and the Shadows of St. Petersburg. Victor, who is also writing a novel about his early years as a teacher, lives with his wife in Los Angeles, California. They have two adult sons.