The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part IX

by Marcum, David;

  NOTE

  Readers may like to know that between 1899 and 1900, Jean-Louis Prévost and Frederic Batelli - two physiologists from the University of Geneva - first demonstrated a device that used small electrical shocks to induce ventricular fibrillation in dogs. It was a forerunner of the modern defibrillator. I was fortunate enough to meet both men at a medical conference in 1902. I am not aware if James Wimshurst knew of their endeavours. Sadly, he passed away in the January of 1903. - JHW.

  About the Contributors

  The following contributors appear in this volume

  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories

  Part IX - 2018 Annual (1879–1895)

  Deanna Baran lives in a remote part of Texas where cowboys may still be seen in their natural habitat. A librarian and former museum curator, she writes in between cups of tea, playing Go, and trading postcards with people around the world. This is her latest venture into the foggy streets of gaslit London.

  Brian Belanger is a publisher and editor, but is best known for his freelance illustration and cover design work. His distinctive style can be seen on several MX Publishing covers, including Silent Meridian by Elizabeth Crowen, Sherlock Holmes and the Menacing Melbournian by Allan Mitchell, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt by David Marcum, Welcome to Undershaw by Luke Benjamen Kuhns, and many more. Brian is the co-founder of Belanger Books LLC, where he illustrates the popular MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes young reader series (#1 bestsellers on Amazon.com UK). A prolific creator, he also designs t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and other merchandise on his personal art site: www.redbubble.com/people/zhahadun.

  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. Her first published novel is The Secret Diary of Mycroft Holmes: The Thoughts and Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes’s Elder Brother, 1880–1888 (2017).

  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 these proper steps into the Sherlock Holmes Community. His first published story, “The Adventure of the Traveling Corpse”, appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VI: 2017 Annual, and his “The Haunting of Hamilton Gardens” was published in PART VIII - Eliminate the Impossible: 1892–1905. 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.

  Leslie Charteris was born in Singapore on May 12th, 1907. With his mother and brother, he moved to England in 1919 and attended Rossall School in Lancashire before moving on to Cambridge University to study law. His studies there came to a halt when a publisher accepted his first novel. His third one, entitled Meet the Tiger, was written when he was twenty years old and published in September 1928. It introduced the world to Simon Templar, aka The Saint. He continued to write about The Saint until 1983 when the last book, Salvage for The Saint, was published. The books, which have been translated into over thirty languages, number nearly a hundred and have sold over forty-million copies around the world. They’ve inspired, to date, fifteen feature films, three television series, ten radio series, and a comic strip that was written by Charteris and syndicated around the world for over a decade. He enjoyed travelling, but settled for long periods in Hollywood, Florida, and finally in Surrey, England. He was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger by the Crime Writers’ Association in 1992, in recognition of a lifetime of achievement. He died the following year.

  Ian Dickerson was just nine years old when he discovered The Saint. Shortly after that, he discovered Sherlock Holmes. The Saint won, for a while anyway. He struck up a friendship with The Saint’s creator, Leslie Charteris and his family. With their permission, he spent six weeks studying the Leslie Charteris collection at Boston University and went on to write, direct, and produce documentaries on the making of The Saint and Return of The Saint, which have been released on DVD. He oversaw the recent reprints of almost fifty of the original Saint books in both the US and UK, and was a co-producer on the 2017 TV movie of The Saint. When he discovered that Charteris had written Sherlock Holmes stories as well - well, there was the excuse he needed to revisit The Canon. He’s consequently written and edited three books on Holmes’ radio adventures. For the sake of what little sanity he has, Ian has also written about a wide range of subjects, none of which come with a halo, including talking mashed potatoes, Lord Grade, and satellite links. Ian lives in Hampshire with his wife and two children. And an awful lot of books by Leslie Charteris. Not quite so many by Conan Doyle, though.

  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.

  C.H. Dye first discovered Sherlock Holmes when she was eleven, in a collection that ended at the Reichenbach Falls. It was another six months before she discovered The Hound of the Baskervilles, and two weeks after that before a librarian handed her The Return. She has loved the stories ever since. She has written fan-fiction, and her first published pastiche, “The Tale of the Forty Thieves”, was included in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part I: 1881–1889. Her story “A Christmas Goose” was in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part V: Christmas Adventures, and “The Mysterious Mourner” in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VIII - Eliminate the Impossible: 1892–1905

  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 fifty 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. 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.

  Sonia Fetherston BSI is a member of the illustrious Baker Street Irregulars. For almost thirty years, she’s been a frequent contributor to Sherlockian anthologies, including Calabash Press’s acclaimed Case Files series, and Wildside Press’s About series. Sonia’s byline often appears in the pages of The Baker Street Journal, The Journal of the Sherlock Holmes Society
of London, Canadian Holmes, and the Sydney Passengers’ Log. Her work earned her the coveted Morley-Montgomery Award from the Baker Street Irregulars, and the Derek Murdoch Memorial Award from The Bootmakers of Toronto. Sonia is author of Prince of the Realm: The Most Irregular James Bliss Austin (BSI Press, 2014). She’s at work on another biography for the BSI, this time about Julian Wolff.

  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.

  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.

  Stephen Gaspar is a writer of historical detective fiction. He has written two Sherlock Holmes books: The Canadian Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Cold-Hearted Murder. Some of his detectives are a Roman Tribune, a medieval monk, and a Templar knight. He was born and lives in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

  Denis Green was born in London, England in April 1905. He grew up mostly in London’s Savoy Theatre where his father, Richard Green, was a principal in many Gilbert and Sullivan productions, A Flying Officer with RAF until 1924, he then spent four years managing a tea estate in North India before making his stage debut in Hamlet with Leslie Howard in 1928. He made his first visit to America in 1931 and established a respectable stage career before appearing in films - including minor roles in the first two Rathbone and Bruce Holmes films - and developing a career in front of and behind the microphone during the golden age of radio. Green and Leslie Charteris met in 1938 and struck up a lifelong friendship. Always busy, be it on stage, radio, film or television, Green passed away at the age of fifty in New York.

  Melissa Grigsby, 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 feel two steps too far away. Based on the Surrey/Hampshire border in England, her time is spent between a great school at the prestigious home of Conan Doyle, and her two children, dogs, and horses, so there never a dull moment.

  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.

  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.

  David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He 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), Sherlock Holmes - Tangled Skeins (2015, 2017), and The Papers of Solar Pons (2017). 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), the two-volume collection of Great Hiatus stories, Holmes Away From Home (2016), Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street (2017), Imagination Theatre’s Sherlock Holmes (2017), a number of forthcoming volumes, and the ongoing collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015–), now at ten volumes, with two more in preparation as of this writing. He has contributed stories, essays, and scripts to The Baker Street Journal, The Strand Magazine, The Watsonian, Beyond Watson, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, About Sixty, About Being a Sherlockian, 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 Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problem (The Engineer’s Thumb”), The Occupants of the Full House, The Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C. (all Scions of The Baker Street Irregulars), The Sherlock Holmes Society of India (as a Patron), 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 Pilgrimages 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!

  New Yorker Nicholas Meyer is the author of three Sherlock Holmes novels, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list), The West End Horror, and The Canary Trainer. His screen adaptation of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was nominated for an Oscar. In addition, Meyer has written and/or directed Star Treks II, IV, and VI, as well as several other films and novels. He also directed The Day After, the most watched film for television ever broadcast. The Day After garnered one-hundred-million viewers in a single night and changed Ronald Reagan’s mind about a winnable nuclear war. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently working on Star Trek: Discovery.

  James Moffett is a Masters graduate in Professional Writing, with a specialisation in novel and non-fiction writing. He also has an extensive background in media studies. James began developing a passion for writing when contributing to his University’s student magazine. His interest in the literary character of Sherlock Holmes was deep-rooted in his youth. He released his first publication of eight interconnected short stories titled The Trials of Sherlock Holmes in 2017, along with a contribution to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VII: Eliminate The Impossible: 1880–1891, with a short story entitled “The Blank Photograph”.

  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 Gre
at 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).

  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.

  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.