The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part IX

by Marcum, David;

  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, 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, and the new series A Sherlock Holmes Alphabet of Cases, all of which are published by Baker Street Studios. He has another novel 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.

  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

  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 Anglican 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.

  Amy Thomas is a member of the Baker Street Babes Podcast, and the author of The Detective and The Woman mystery novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. She blogs at girlmeetssherlock.wordpress.com, and she writes and edits professionally from her home in Fort Myers, Florida.

  Kevin Thornton lives in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. It is a place chiefly known for being cold. How cold? The type of cold where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet at minus forty and say to each other, “We have to stop doing this.” Kevin writes poetry and short stories that are published and read by dozens of people, and books that are not. Nevertheless, he has been a finalist in the Canadian Crime Writers awards six times, and was honoured with the Literature “Buffy” award in his locale up there in the north (where we might have mentioned it is cold). Kevin is or has been a member of the Crime Writers Association, the Edmonton Poetry Festival, the International Thriller Writers, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Crime Writers of Canada, and the KEYS, the Catholic Writers Guild founded by two chaps called Chesterton and Knox, albeit before his time. He studied at one of those universities that had two Nobel Laureates in Literature on the staff. It didn’t seem to do much good. Kevin now works as a writer and editor, having been a contractor for the Canadian military, a member of the South African Air Force, and a worker of such peripatetic habits that he is now on his fourth continent and many-eth country.

  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 and The Peaceful Night Poisonings. She can be contacted at: gravelgirty.deviantart.com

  The following contributors appear in the companion volume

  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories

  Part X - 2018 Annual (1896–1916)

  Hugh Ashton was born in the U.K., and moved to Japan in 1988, where he remained until 2016, living with his wife Yoshiko in the historic city of Kamakura, a little to the south of Yokohama. He and Yoshiko have now moved to Lichfield, a small cathedral city in the Midlands of the U.K., the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, and one-time home of Erasmus Darwin. In the past, he has worked in the technology and financial services industries, which have provided him with material for some of his books set in the 21st century. He currently works as a writer: Novelist, freelance editor, and copywriter, (his work for large Japanese corporations has appeared in international business journals), and journalist, as well as producing industry reports on various aspects of the financial services industry. Recently, however, his lifelong interest in Sherlock Holmes has developed into an acclaimed series of adventures featuring the world’s most famous detective, written in the style of the originals, and published by Inknbeans Press. In addition to these, he has also published historical and alternate historical novels, short stories, and thrillers. Together with artist Andy Boerger, he has produced the Sherlock Ferret series of stories for children, featuring the world’s cutest detective.

  Derrick Belanger is and educator and also 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, 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 co-owns the publishing company Belanger Books, which released the Sherlock Holmes anthologies Beyond Watson, Holmes Away From Home: Adventures from the Great Hiatus Volumes 1 and 2, Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street, and Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of H.G. Wells Volumes 1 and 2. Derrick resides in Colorado and continues compiling unpublished works by Dr. John H. Watson.

  Maurice Barkley lives with his wife Marie in a suburb of Rochester, New York. Retired from a career as a commercial artist and builder of tree houses, he is writing and busy reinforcing the stereotype of a pesky househusband. His other Sherlock Holmes stories can be found on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/author/mauricebarkleys

  Steven Ehrman is an American musician and author of the Sherlock Holmes Uncovered tales. These are traditional Sherlock Holmes stories with every effort to adhere to the canon. He is a lifelong admirer of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and spent countless hours as a youth reading The Master’s works.

  Paul A. Freeman is the author of Rumours of Ophir, a novel which was taught in Zimbabwean high schools and has been translated into German. In addition to having two crime novels, a children’s book, and an 18,000-word narrative poem commercially published, Paul is also the author over a hundred published short stories, articles, and poems. Paul currently works in Abu Dhabi, where he lives with his wife and three children

  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, t
alents, 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.

  Jayantika Ganguly BSI is the General Secretary and Editor of the Sherlock Holmes Society of India, a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and the Czech Sherlock Holmes Society. She is the author of The Holmes Sutra (MX 2014). She is a corporate lawyer working with one of the Big Six law firms.

  Dick Gillman is an English writer and acrylic artist living in Brittany, France with his wife Alex, Truffle, their Black Labrador, and Jean-Claude, their Breton cat. During his retirement from teaching, he has written over twenty Sherlock Holmes short stories which are published as both e-books and paperbacks. His contribution to the superb MX Sherlock Holmes collection, published in October 2015, was entitled “The Man on Westminster Bridge” and had the privilege of being chosen as the anchor story in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part II (1890–1895).

  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.

  Greg Hatcher has been writing for one outlet or another since 1992. He was a contributing editor at WITH magazine for over a decade, and during that time he was a three-time winner of the Higher Goals Award for children’s writing; once for fiction and twice for non-fiction. After that he wrote a weekly column for ten years and change at Comic Book Resources, as one of the rotating features on the Comics Should Be Good! blog. Currently he has a weekly column at Atomic Junk Shop (www.atomicjunkshop.com) He also teaches writing in the Young Authors classes offered as part of the Seattle YMCA’s Afterschool Arts Program for students in the 6th through the 12th grade. A lifelong mystery fan, he has written Nero Wolfe pastiches for the Wolfe Pack Gazette and several Sherlock Holmes adventures for Airship 27’s Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective series. He lives in Burien, Washington, with his wife Julie, their cat Magdalene, and ten thousand books and comics.

  Mike Hogan writes mostly historical novels and short stories, many set in Victorian London and featuring Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. He read the Conan Doyle stories at school with great enjoyment, but hadn’t thought much about Sherlock Holmes until, having missed the Granada/Jeremy Brett TV series when it was originally shown in the eighties, he came across a box set of videos in a street market and was hooked on Holmes again. He started writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches several years ago, having great fun re-imagining situations for the Conan Doyle characters to act in. The relationship between Holmes and Watson fascinates him as one of the great literary friendships. (He’s also a huge admirer of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels). Like Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin, Holmes and Watson are an odd couple, differing in almost every facet of their characters, but sharing a common sense of decency and a common humanity. Living with Sherlock Holmes can’t have been easy, and Mike enjoys adding a stronger vein of “pawky humour” into the Conan Doyle mix, even letting Watson have the second-to-last word on occasions. His books include Sherlock Holmes and the Scottish Question, the forthcoming The Gory Season - Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Murders and the Sherlock Holmes & Young Winston 1887 Trilogy (The Deadwood Stage; The Jubilee Plot; and The Giant Moles), He has also written the following short story collections: Sherlock Holmes: Murder at the Savoy and Other Stories, Sherlock Holmes: The Skull of Kohada Koheiji and Other Stories, and Sherlock Holmes: Murder on the Brighton Line and Other Stories. www.mikehoganbooks.com

  Kelvin I. Jones is the author of six books about Sherlock Holmes and the definitive biography of Conan Doyle as a spiritualist, Conan Doyle and The Spirits. A member of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, he has published numerous short occult and ghost stories in British anthologies over the last thirty years. His work has appeared on BBC Radio, and in 1984 he won the Mason Hall Literary Award for his poem cycle about the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, recently reprinted as “Omega”. (Oakmagic Publications) A one-time teacher of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, he is also the author of four crime novels featuring his ex-met sleuth John Bottrell, who first appeared in Stone Dead. He has over fifty titles on Kindle, and is also the author of several novellas and short story collections featuring a Norwich based detective, DCI Ketch, an intrepid sleuth who invesitgates East Anglian murder cases. He also published a series of short stories about an Edwardian psychic detective, Dr. John Carter (Carter’s Occult Casebook). Ramsey Campbell, the British horror writer, and Francis King, the renowned novelist, have both compared his supernatural stories to those of M. R. James. He has also published children’s fiction, namely Odin’s Eye, and, in collaboration with his wife Debbie, The Dark Entry. Since 1995, he has been the proprietor of Oakmagic Publications, publishers of British folklore and of his fiction titles. (See www.oakmagicpublications.co.uk) He lives in Norfolk.

  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. Additionally, his “The Adventure of the Glassy Ghost” appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part VIII - Eliminate the Impossible: 1892–1905.

  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

  Martin Rosenstock studied English, American, and German literature. In 2008, he received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara for looking into what happens when things go badly - as they do from time to time - for detectives in German-language literature. After job hopping around the colder latitudes of the U.S. for three years, he decided to return to warmer climes. In 2011, he took a job at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait, where he currently teaches. When not brooding over plot twists, he spends too much time and money traveling the Indian Ocean littoral. There is a novel somewhere there, he feels sure.

  G. L. Sc
hulze is a life-long resident of Michigan and a retired officer with the Michigan Department of Corrections. Gen enjoys gardening, walking, woodworking, wood burning, and beadwork, as well as reading and writing. She also enjoys spending time with her rescue dog, Java. She is the author of six books in her Young Detectives’ Mystery Series, as well as her first Sherlock Holmes novel, Gray Manor. A second Holmes novel, The Ring and The Box, A Sherlock Holmes Mystery of Ancient Egypt is slated for release in early spring. For further information about Gen’s books visit her Amazon link at https://www.amazon.com/Gen-Schulze/e/B00KTH36LO

  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.

  Thaddeus Tuffentsamer is the author of the young adult series, F.A.R.T.S. The Federal Agency for Reconnaissance and Tactical Services, and the satirical self-help book, Are You SURE About That? Observations and Life Lessons from a High Functioning Sociopath. He resides in Goodyear, AZ, with his wife and youngest daughter. He has always been a fan of Sherlock Holmes, but his passion was reignited when his daughter took an interest in reading those wonderful adventures, for which they together now share a deep appreciation. He is not on social media - doesn’t know how - but loves to connect personally with his readers by email at thaddeustuffentsamer@gmail.com His books can be found on Amazon.