The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VI
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Derrick Belanger is the author of the #1 bestselling book in its category, Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Peculiar Provenance, which was in the top-200 bestselling books on Amazon. He also is the author of The MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes books, the latest of which is Curse of the Deadly Dinosaur, and he edited the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle horror anthology A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural. Mr. Belanger has recently started the publishing company Belanger Books, which released the Sherlock Holmes anthology Beyond Watson. Derrick Belanger also is a frequent contributor to I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. He resides in Colorado and continues compiling unpublished works by Dr. John H. Watson.
S.F. Bennett was born and raised in London, studying History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, and Journalism at City University at the Postgraduate level, before moving to Devon in 2013. The author lectures on Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and 19th century detective fiction, and has had articles on various aspects from The Canon published in The Journal of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and The Torr, the journal of The Poor Folk Upon The Moors, the Sherlock Holmes Society of the South West of England.
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.
Nick Cardillo has loved Sherlock Holmes ever since he was first introduced to the detective in The Great Illustrated Classics edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at the age of six. His devotion to the Baker Street detective duo has only increased over the years, and Nick is thrilled to be taking his first, proper steps into the Sherlock Holmes Community. A devout fan of The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Hammer Horror, and Doctor Who, Nick co-writes the Sherlockian blog, Back on Baker Street, which analyses over seventy years of Sherlock Holmes film and culture. He is a student at Susquehanna University.
Molly Carr has been writing articles (paid and unpaid!) for many years on every conceivable subject for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, and once had a tale accepted for the BBC’s Morning Story slot. But it wasn’t until she discovered MX Publishing that she attempted a whole book. In fact, she has written five books: The Sign of Fear and A Study in Crimson, which are meant to be funny, a semi-academic In Search of Dr. Watson, a collection of pieces with the title Sherlock in the Spring Time, and A Sherlock Holmes Who’s Who - which one critic said would do in lieu of anything better, and another called “excellent”. She lives in a beautiful part of the country, which unfortunately is sometimes disturbed by the very noisy lawnmowers of landscape gardeners. This makes her long for a cork-lined room in which to compose something readers might see as really worthwhile.
Jennifer Copping is a native of Northumberland. She first encountered Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson aged about ten, and has had an interest in their exploits ever since. She is usually to be found selling books rather than contributing to them, but has found the latter a welcome, if surprising, change.
Carla Coupe fell into writing short stories almost without noticing. Two of her short stories - “Rear View Murder” in Chesapeake Crimes II and “Dangerous Crossing” in Chesapeake Crimes 3 - were nominated for Agatha Awards. She has written a number of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which have appeared in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Sherlock’s Home: The Empty House, Irene’s Cabinet, and other anthologies. Her story “The Book of Tobit” was included in The Best American Mystery Stories of 2012.
C. Edward “Chuck” Davis was born and raised in New Jersey, and has lived in Colorado since 1993. He worked for over forty years as a draftsman and technical illustrator for AT&T, Sikorsky Aircraft, Exxon Engineering and Research, and Lockheed-Martin/Federal Aviation Administration. Additionally, he provided research, editing, illustrations, and technical advisory services for a number of publications, and is currently working on several projects, including The Lunarnauts: The Rescue of Professor Cavor (A sequel to the 1901 H. G. Wells novel The First Men in the Moon), The Years of Infamy: The Japanese Invasion of Hawaii, and The Lion of the Sea (Il Leone di Mare), a historical fictional novel based upon the experiences of his late father-in-law who served in the Italian Navy during World War II.
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.
Jan Edwards is a British author. She was born near Horsham, Sussex, UK, but now lives in Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, Peter Coleborn, and the obligatory three cats. She has a life-long passion for folklore and the supernatural, and draws on this for her fiction. To date, forty-plus of her short stories have seen publication in magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Moriarty, and Terror Tales of the Ocean. Much of her published short fiction is reprinted in the collections Leinster Gardens and Other Subtleties and Fables and Fabrications. Jan won a Winchester Slim Volume Prize for her rural novel Sussex Tales, was short-listed for a BFS Award for Best Short Story as an author, and short listed three times as editor of anthologies. She edits anthologies for the award winning Alchemy Press and also for Fox Spirit Books. In a previous existence she has been Chairperson for both the British Fantasy Society and Fantasycon. Other works by Jan Edwards include Leinster Gardens and Other Subtleties, Sussex Tales and Fables and Fabrications. Anthologies edited by Jan and Jenny Barber include The Alchemy Book of Ancient Wonders, The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic, The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic:2, and Wicked Women. Jan’s World War II crime novel Winter Downs is due for publication in 2017. For more details on Jan and her fiction visit http://janedwardsblog.wordpress.com/
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 in 2010. Today, Steve is CCO at collectAI in Hamburg, a German fintech company using Artificial Intelligence to help companies with their debt collection. Steve is a regular trade show speaker on the subject of eCommerce, and his tech career has taken him to more than forty countries - so he’s no stranger to planes and airports. He wrote two novels (one a 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. MX is a social enterprise and supports two main causes. The first is Happy Life, 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. The second is the Stepping Stones School, of which Steve is a patron. Stepping Stones is located at Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former home.
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 fee
l 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.
James R. “Jim” French became a morning DJ on KIRO (AM) in Seattle in 1959. He later founded Imagination Theatre, a syndicated program that broadcast to over 120 stations in the U.S. and Canada, and also on the XM Satellite Radio system all over North America. Actors in French’s dramas have 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 states, “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.”
David Friend lives in Wales, UK, where he divides his time between watching old detective films and thinking about old detective films. Now twenty-eight, 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. This is his first published story.
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.
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.
Keith Hann is a Canadian Ph.D. student, slaving away in the realm of military and diplomatic history. To dodge dissertation deadlines, he enjoys pulp fiction, trash cinema, and crafting the occasional Holmes piece, one of which has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Narrelle M. Harris is a Melbourne-based writer of crime, horror, fantasy and non-fiction. Her books include Fly By Night, fantasies Witch Honour and Witch Faith (both short-listed for the George Turner Prize), and vampire books The Opposite of Life and Walking Shadows. The latter was nominated for the Chronos Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and shortlisted for the Davitt Awards for crime writing. Narrelle also writes erotic romance. Find out more at www.narrellemharris.com.
Carl L. Heifetz Over thirty years of inquiry as a research microbiologist have prepared Carl Heifetz to explore new horizons in science. As an author, he has published numerous articles and short stories for fan magazines and other publications. In 2013 he published a book entitled Voyage of the Blue Carbuncle that is based on the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Gene Roddenberry. Voyage of the Blue Carbuncle is a fun and exciting spoof, sure to please science fiction fans as well as those who love the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Carl and his wife have two grown children and live in Trinity, Florida.
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.
Colin Jeavons was born in Wales in 1929, and his family moved to West Bromwich before his first birthday. He married the ballet dancer Rosie Jeavons in 1965. He is a television actor, and began a long association with Dickens productions on BBC Television in 1959 with roles in Bleak House and Great Expectations. In 1966, he became well known for his definitive portrayal of Uriah Heep in the BBC’s David Copperfield. He appeared in a host of 1960’s and 1970’s TV programmes, including Doctor Who (in “The Underwater Menace”). In the 1980’s, he was involved with two popular dramatisations of Sherlock Holmes stories playing Professor Moriarty in The Baker Street Boys (1982) “with chilling authority” (in the words of writer David Stuart Davies,) and Inspector Lestrade “with great panache” in the Granada Television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (According to producer Michael Cox, Jeavons was the best Lestrade of his generation.) He continued as Lestrade throughout the Granada series, and also had roles in numerous other productions. Jeavons retired from acting in 1993.
Roger Johnson BSI, ASH 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.
Bonnie MacBird BSI, ASH 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 lodgings in London. She runs The Sherlock Breakfast Club and a play-reading series in Los Angeles, where she also teaches writing at UCLA Extension. Her Sherlockian first novel, Art in the Blood (HarperCollins 2015) dealt with kidnapping, murder, and an art theft, and challenged Holmes’s artistic nature and his friendship with Watson to the limits. Her next novel, Unquiet Spirits (HarperCollins)
about ghosts and the whisky business, will 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, 2016) 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,) Holmes Away From Home, a two-volume set of stories from The Great Hiatus, the forthcoming Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street, and most recently this ongoing anthology collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015- ), now at six volumes and counting. He has contributed stories, essays, and scripts to The Baker Street Journal, The Watsonian, Beyond Watson, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, About Sixty, The Solar Pons Gazette, Imagination Theater, The Proceedings of the Pondicherry Lodge, 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 Occupants of the Full House and The Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C., (both Scions of The Baker Street Irregulars), 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 his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return trips in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!