by David Marcum
53 From Hamlet’s great soliloquy in Act III, Scene 1: “Who would these Fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn / No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have, / Than fly to others that we know not of.”
54 Watson compares Holmes to a machine in several other places in the Canon, most notably in “A Scandal in Bohemia”: “He was... the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen;” and “The Adventure of the Crooked Man”: “[the] composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man.”
55 Holmes must have acquired this from Gregson after the successful conclusion of the events of A Study in Scarlet.
56 This is a typical example of an English-centric world view of the Victorian era. The Decameron of Boccaccio (1313-1375) was completed in 1353, while The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 - 1400) was not published until 1483, and was almost certainly inspired by the earlier work.
57 Holmes certainly did so, for soon after this adventure he could be found reading a “pocket Petrarch” (one of the great Italian Renaissance poets) upon the train to Ross (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”).
About the Contributors
Hugh Ashton was born in the UK, and moved to Japan in 1988, where he has remained since then, living with his wife Yoshiko in the historic city of Kamakura, a little to the south of Yokohama. 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, copywriter (his work for large Japanese corporations appears 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.
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 first venture into the foggy streets of gaslit London.
Kevin David Barratt became a fan of Sherlock Holmes whilst at school. He is an active member of the The Scandalous Bohemians, a group who meet regularly in Leeds and for whom Kevin has contributed an essay on Sherlock Holmes and Drugs (which can be read at www.scandalousbohemians.com). Kevin is also a member of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London. He is married with two grown-up children and lives in Yorkshire.
Derrick Belanger is an author and educator most noted for his books and lectures on Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as his writing for the blog I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. Both volumes of his two-volume anthology, A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural were #1 best sellers on the Amazon.com UK Sherlock Holmes book list, and his MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes chapter book, Attack of the Violet Vampire! was also a #1 bestselling new release in the UK. His novella, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Peculiar Provenance, is forthcoming from Endeavour Press. Mr. Belanger’s academic work has been published in The Colorado Reading Journal and Gifted Child Today. Find him at www.belangerbooks.com.
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 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 fanfiction, but this is her first published pastiche.
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 Technologies in 2010. Steve is a regular trade show speaker on the subject of mobile commerce, and his time at Powa has taken him to more than forty countries - so he’s no stranger to planes and airports. He wrote two novels (one 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 around one hundred authors and over two hundred books. Profits from MX go towards his second passion - 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.
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.
Jayantika Ganguly 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.
Bob Gibson, graphic designer, is the Director at Staunch Design, located in Oxford, England. In addition to designing the covers for MX Book publications, Staunch also provides identity design and brand development for small and medium sized companies through print and web for a wide range of clients, including independent schools, retail, financial services and the health sector. www.staunch.com
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.
Dr. John Hall has written widely on Holmes. His books includes Sidelights on Holmes, a commentary on the Canon, The Abominable Wife, on the unrecorded cases, Unexplored Possibilities, a study of Dr. John H. Watson, and a monograph on Professor Moriarty, “The Dynamics of a Falling Star”. (Most of these are now out of print.) His novels include Sherlock Holmes and the Adler Papers, The Travels of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Boulevard Assassin, Sherlock Holmes and the Disgraced Inspector, Sherlock Holmes and the Telephone Mystery, Sherlock Holmes and the Hammerford Will, Sherlock Holmes and the Abbey School Mystery, and Sherlock Holmes at the Raffles Hotel. John is a member of the International Pipe-smoker’s Hall of Fame, and lives in Yorkshire, England.
John Heywood (not the author’s real name) was born in Gloucestershire in 1951, and educated at Katharine Lady Berkeley’s Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge. After graduating, he supported himself in many
different ways, including teaching, decorating, house-sitting, laboring, and mowing graveyards, while at the same time making paintings, prints and drawings. He continues to make art, and his work is now in collections in Europe and America, and is regularly exhibited. He currently lives in Brixton, South London, and works as a painter and as a teacher of art and English in adult education. In 2014, his first book, The Investigations of Sherlock Holmes, was published by MX Publishing. It was enthusiastically received by the critics, and has recently been issued in India.
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, and a Watsonian novel entitled The Isle of Devils. His next project is the short trilogy The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes. Craig Janacek is a nom de plume.
Roger Johnson BSI is a retired librarian, now working as a volunteer assistant at 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.
Leslie S. Klinger BSI is the editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and many other books on Holmes, Watson, and the Victorian age.
Luke Benjamen Kuhns is a crime writer who lives in London. He has authored several Sherlock Holmes collections including The Untold Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (published in India & Italy), Sherlock Holmes Studies in Legacy, and the graphic novel Sherlock Holmes and the Horror of Frankenstein. He has written and spoken on the various forms of pastiche writing, which can be found in the Fan Phenomena Series: Sherlock Holmes.
Michael Kurland has written over thirty novels and a melange of short stories, articles, and other stuff, and has been nominated for two Edgars and the American Book Award. His books have appeared in Chinese, Czech, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and some alphabet full of little pothooks and curlicues. He lives in a Secular Humanist Hermitage in a secluded bay north of San Francisco, California, where he kills and skins his own vegetables. He may be communicated with through his website, michaelkurland.com.
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) 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,) and most recently this current collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015). He has contributed essays to the Baker Street Journal 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 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 a trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!
Daniel McGachey Outside of his day job - which, over the past quarter century has seen him write extensively for comics, newspapers, magazines, digital media, and animation - Scottish writer Daniel McGachey’s stories first appeared in several volumes of The BHF Book of Horror Stories and Black Book of Horror anthology series, and Filthy Creations magazine. In 2009, Dark Regions Press published his first ghost story collection, They That Dwell in Dark Places, dedicated in part to M.R. James, whose works inspired the creation of the collected stories. Since 2005, he has reviewed television and radio adaptations of James’s stories for The Ghosts and Scholars M.R. James Newsletter, while his sequels to several of James’s original tales appeared as the Haunted Library publication Ex Libris: Lufford in 2012. Moving from M.R. James to his other lifelong literary hero, his 2010 Dark Regions Press collection pitted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s rational detective against the irrational forces of the supernatural in Sherlock Holmes: The Impossible Cases. His radio plays have been broadcast since 2005 as part of the mystery and suspense series Imagination Theater, including entries in its long-running strand of new Holmesian mysteries, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He is working on a new “impossible case” for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the novel, The Devil’s Crown.
Adrian Middleton is a Staffordshire born independent publisher. The son of a real-world detective, he is a former civil servant and policy adviser who now writes and edits science fiction, fantasy, and a popular series of steampunked Sherlock Holmes stories.
Steve Mountain is a “born and bred” native of Portsmouth in the UK. Married with two grown-up children, he works for a local Council as a civil engineer, trying to retro-fit cycle riding facilities into roads not originally built for the purpose. This is usually, but not always, successful. Seeing his name in print is nothing new, although to date this has been mostly in articles in the local newspaper complaining about the effect of said cycle facilities on other road users. Having helped his daughter solve a problem with one of her Holmes pastiches, he caught the fiction writing bug himself. He has self-published one of his early stories with Lulu.
Mark Mower is a crime writer and historian and a member of the Crime Writers’ Association. His books include Bloody British History: Norwich (The History Press, 2014) and Suffolk Murders (The History Press, 2011). His first book, Suffolk Tales of Mystery & Murder (Countryside Books, 2006), contained a potent blend of tales from the seamier side of country life - described by the East Anglian Daily Times Suffolk magazine as “...a good serving of grisliness, a strong flavour of the unusual, a seasoning of ghoulishness and just a hint of the unexpected...” Alongside his writing, Mark lectures on crime history and runs a murder mystery business.
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 first published in The Strand magazine, defining Holmes’s image forever after in the public mind.
Summer Perkins is a film student who lives in Portland, Oregon, and has been a fan of the various incarnations of Sherlock Holmes for many years. Though no stranger to writing in the world of Holmes, this is Summer’s first published piece. In addition to writing, Summer can be found reading, watching films,
and studying various eras in history.
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.
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
Denis O. Smith’s first published story of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, “The Adventure of The Purple Hand”, appeared in 1982. Since then, numerous other such accounts have been published in magazines and anthologies both in the U.K. and the U.S. In the 1990’s, four volumes of his stories were published under the general title of The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, and, more recently, a dozen of his stories, most not previously published in book form, appeared as The Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (2014), and he wrote a new story for the anthology, Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015). Born in Yorkshire, in the north of England, Denis Smith has lived and worked in various parts of the country, including London, and has now been resident in Norfolk for many years. His interests range widely, but apart from his dedication to the career of Sherlock Holmes, he has a passion for historical mysteries of all kinds, the railways of Britain and the history of London.
