by David Marcum
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.
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
Dick Gillman is a Yorkshire-man in his mid-sixties. He retired from teaching Science in 2005 and moved to Brittany, France in 2008 with his wife Alex, Truffle the Black Labrador, and two cats. He still has strong family links with the UK, where he visits his two grown up children and his grandchildren. Dick is a prolific writer, and during his retirement he has written fourteen Sherlock Holmes short stories and a Sci-Fi novella. His latest short story, “Sherlock Holmes and The Man on Westminster Bridge” was completed in July 2015, and is published for the first time in this anthology.
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.
Jack Grochot is a retired investigative newspaper journalist and a former federal law enforcement agent specializing in mail fraud cases. He lives on a small farm in southwestern Pennsylvania, USA, where he writes and cares for five boarded horses. His fiction work includes stories in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Sherlock Holmes Megapack (an e-book), as well as the book Come, Watson! Quickly!, a collection of five Sherlock Holmes pastiches. The author, an active member of Mystery Writers of America, can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].
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.
Jeremy Holstein first discovered Sherlock Holmes at age five when he became convinced that the Hound of the Baskervilles lived in his bedroom closet. A life long enthusiast of radio dramas, Jeremy is currently the lead dramatist and director for the Post Meridian Radio Players adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, where he has adapted The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of Four, and “Jack the Harlot Killer” (retitled “The Whitechapel Murders”) from William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street for the company. He is currently in production with an adaptation of “Charles Augustus Milverton”. Jeremy has also written Sherlock Holmes scripts for Jim French’s Imagination Theatre. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Boston, MA area.
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 about four 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. Mike is British, and he lives in Italy. His books include Sherlock Holmes and the Scottish Question; 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
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.
Ann Margaret Lewis attended Michigan State University, where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. She began her writing career writing tie-in children’s books and short stories for DC Comics. She then published two editions of the book Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Alien Species for Random House. She is the author of the award-winning Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (Wessex Press), and her most recent book is a Holmes novel entitled The Watson Chronicles: A Sherlock Holmes Novel in Stories (Wessex Press).
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!
William Patrick Maynard was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. His passion for writing began in childhood and was fueled by early love of detective and thriller fiction. He was licensed by the Sax R
ohmer Literary Estate to continue the Fu Manchu thrillers for Black Coat Press. The Terror of Fu Manchu was published in 2009 and was followed by The Destiny of Fu Manchu in 2012 and The Triumph of Fu Manchu in 2015. His previous Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in Gaslight Grotesque (2009/EDGE Publishing) and Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes (2014/Titan Books). He currently resides in Northeast Ohio with his wife and family.
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.
Chris Redmond, BSI, is editor of the website Sherlockian.Net, and the author of A Sherlock Holmes Handbook, In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, and other books, as well as many Sherlockian articles. He is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Bootmakers of Toronto, The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, and other societies. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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.
Sam Wiebe’s debut novel Last of the Independents was published by Dundurn Press. An alternative private detective novel set in the Pacific Northwest, Last of the Independents, won the 2012 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Unpublished First Novel. Sam’s short fiction has been published in Thuglit, Spinetingler, Subterrain, and Criminal Element, among others. Follow him at @sam_wiebe and at samwiebe.com.
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. She can be contacted at gravelgirty.deviantart.com
Vincent W. Wright has been a Sherlockian and member of The Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis since 1997. He is the creator of a blog, Historical Sherlock, which is dedicated to the chronology of The Canon, and has written a column on that subject for his home scion’s newsletter since 2005. He lives in Indiana, and works for the federal government. This is his first pastiche.
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