The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VI
Page 88
Julie McKuras ASH, BSI discovered Sherlock Holmes at the age of eleven through the late night magic of the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films. It was a bonus to learn there were actually books written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She served as the President of The Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota for nine years, and has been on the board of The Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections since 1997, editing their quarterly newsletter since 1999. Julie was the first editor of The BSI Trust newsletter as well. She is a frequent contributor to the Friends newsletter, and has had articles published in the Baker Street Journal, London’s Sherlock Holmes Journal, Through the Magic Door, and The Serpentine Muse. Her essays have been included in The Norwegian Explorers Christmas Annuals, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes: Essays and Art on The Doctor and The Detective, “A Note on the Sherlock Holmes Collections” published in The Horror of the Heights, Violets and Vitriol, and Sherlock Holmes in the Heartland: The Illustrious Clients Fifth Casebook. She is a co-editor of The Missing Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, and with Susan Vizoskie, she co-edited Sherlockian Heresies. Julie has been a speaker at a number of conferences and events, such as The Sherlock Holmes Society of London’s Statue Festival, Holmes Under the Arch, the Newberry Library, From Gillette to Brett, and the 2014 Reichenbach Irregulars Conference in Davos. She lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota with her husband, Mike, and with her children, their spouses, and her three grandchildren nearby.
Mark Mower is a crime writer and historian whose passion for tales about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson began at the age of twelve, when he watched an early black-and-white film featuring the unrivalled screen pairing of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Hastily seeking out the original stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and continually searching for further film and television adaptations, his has been a lifelong obsession. Now a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Mark has written numerous books about true crime stories and fictional murder mysteries. His first Holmes and Watson tale, “The Strange Missive of Germaine Wilkes” appeared as a chapter in Volume I of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (MX Publishing, 2015). His own collection of pastiches, A Farewell to Baker Street (MX Publishing, 2015) appeared shortly afterwards. His non-fiction works have included Bloody British History: Norwich (The History Press, 2014) and Suffolk Murders (The History Press, 2011). Alongside his writing, Mark lectures on crime history and runs a murder mystery business. He lives close to Beccles, in the English county of Suffolk.
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 that were first published in The Strand magazine, defining Holmes’s image forever after in the public mind.
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 himself 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, 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.
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.
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.
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 was published in 2015, and Return to Reichenbach in 2016. She lives in Kells, Ireland.
Shane Simmons is a multi-award-winning screenwriter and graphic novelist whose work has appeared in international film festivals, museums, and lectures about design and structure. His best-known piece of fiction, The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers, has been discussed in multiple books and academic journals about sequential art, and his short stories have been printed in critically praised anthologies of history, crime, and horror. He lives in Montreal with his wife and too many cats. Follow him at eyestrainproductions.com and @Shane_Eyestrain
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 ma
inly harmless, as his wife and daughter might concede with a little persuasion.
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.
David Timson has made over one-thousand broadcasts for BBC Radio Drama. In 2002, he won the Audio Award of the Year for his reading of A Study in Scarlet, and he has read the entire Sherlock Holmes Canon for Naxos AudioBooks.
Thomas A. Turley has been “hooked on Holmes” since finishing The Hound of the Baskervilles at about the age of twelve. However, his interest in Sherlockian pastiches didn’t really take off until he wrote one. “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Tainted Canister” (2014) is available as an e-book and audio book from MX Publishing. Another (non-Holmes) story, “The Devil’s Claw”, appeared in The Book of Villains (2011), a Main Street Rag anthology. Currently, Tom is hard at work on Sherlock Holmes and the Crowned Heads of Europe, a new collection of historically-based cases that will include the one found in this volume. Although Tom has a Ph.D. in British history, he spent most of his career as an archivist with the State of Alabama. He and his wife, Paula, (an aspiring science fiction novelist,) live in Montgomery, Alabama. They are the proud parents of two grown children and one bossy little yellow dog.
Nicholas Utechin BSI joined The Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1966, aged fourteen. Ten years later he became Editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal - a position he held for thirty years. The year 1976 also saw the publication of two Holmes pastiches he co-wrote: The Earthquake Machine and Hellbirds. This is his first venture in the field since then. He is a Baker Street Irregular, an honorary senior member of The Sons of the the Copper Beeches scion society, a founding member of The John H. Watson Society, and has contributed extensively to Sherlockian scholarship over the decades. The fact that he is related to Basil Rathbone could have something to do with this madness. In another life, he was a senior producer and occasional presenter for BBC Radio in the field of current affairs. Now retired, he lives in Oxford, UK with his wife, Annie, follows the careers of their two sons with interest, and the lives of their two grandchildren with love. He believes he knows quite a lot about fine wine and silent films (meeting and interviewing Lillian Gish was something special,) and is lucky enough to own a Sidney Paget original (sadly not one for a Sherlock Holmes story.)
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 The Outrage at the Diogenes Club, Jack London. 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.
Stephen Wade has a special interest in crime history, having published widely on regional crime. His book, The Girl Who Lived on Air (Seren) was a Welsh Book of the Month for Waterstones. He was formerly a lecturer in English, and also worked as a writer in prisons for six years. His latest book is a short story collection, Uncle Albert (Priory Press). The current fiction project is a collection of crime stories featuring Lestrade.
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