by David Marcum
Steven Philip Jones has written over sixty graphic novels and comic books including Curious Cases of Sherlock Holmes, the original series Nightlinger, Street Heroes 2005, adaptations of Dracula, several H. P. Lovecraft stories, and the 1985 film Re-animator. Steven is also the author of several novels and nonfiction books including The Clive Cussler Adventures: A Critical Review, Comics Writing: Communicating With Comic Book , King of Harlem, Bushwackers, The House With the Witch’s Hat, TalisMAN:The Knightmare Knife, and Henrietta Hex: Shadows From the Past. Steven’s other writing credits include a number of scripts for radio dramas that have been broadcast internationally. A graduate of the University of Iowa, Steven has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Religion, and was accepted into Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. program.
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.
Rand B. Lee is a freelance writer whose fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He is the youngest surviving child of Manfred B. Lee, co-author with Frederic Dannay of the Ellery Queen detective stories. Rand lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
James Lovegrove is the author of more than fifty books, including The Hope, Days, Untied Kingdom, Provender Gleed, the New York Times bestselling Pantheon series, the Redlaw novels, and the Dev Harmer Missions. He has produced three Sherlock Holmes novels, with a Holmes/Cthulhu mashup trilogy in the works, the first being Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows. He has also sold well over forty short stories and published two collections, Imagined Slights and Diversifications. He has produced a dozen short books for readers with reading difficulties, and a four-volume fantasy saga for teenagers, The Clouded World, under the pseudonym Jay Amory. James has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, and the Manchester Book Award. His short story “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages, and his journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as Literary Review, Interzone, and BBC MindGames. He reviews fiction regularly for the Financial Times. He lives with his wife, two sons, cat, and tiny dog in Eastbourne, not far from the site of the “small farm upon the South Downs” to which Sherlock Holmes retired.
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) and Sherlock Holmes - Tangled Skeins (2015, 2017), and the forthcoming 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 - Forthcoming), and most recently the ongoing collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015- ), now at eight volumes, with two more in preparation as of this writing. He has contributed stories, essays, and scripts to The Baker Street Journal, The Watsonian, Beyond Watson, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, About Sixty, About Being a Sherlockian (Forthcoming), 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 Occupants of the Full House and The Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C. (both Scions of The Baker Street Irregulars), 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!
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.
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 has also released his first publication of eight interconnected short stories titled The Trials of Sherlock Holmes earlier this year.
Jacquelynn Morris, ASH, BSI, JHWS, is a member of several Sherlock Holmes societies in the Mid-Atlantic area of the U.S.A., but her home group is Watson’s Tin Box in Maryland. She is the founder of A Scintillation of Scions, an annual Sherlock Holmes symposium that is in its eleventh year. She has been published in the BSI Manuscript Series, The Wrong Passage, as well as in About Sixty and the upcoming About Being a Sherlockian (Wildside Press). Jacquelynn was the U.S. liaison for the Undershaw Preservation Trust for several years, until Undershaw was purchased to become part of Stepping Stones School. This is her first opportunity to have the honor of working with David Marcum and MX Publishing
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. A forthcoming collection, Sherlock Holmes: The Baker Street Case Files will be released in late 2017. 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.
Gayle Lange Puhl has been a Sherlockian since Christmas of 1965. She has had articles published in The Devon County Chronicle, The Baker Street Journal, and The Serpentine Muse, plus her local newspaper. She has created Sherlockian jewelry, a 2006 calendar entitled “If Watson Wrote For TV”, and has painted a limited series of Holmes-related nesting dolls. She co-founded the scion Friends of the Great Grimpen Mire and the Janesville, Wisconsin-based The Original Tree Worshipers. In January 2016, she was awarded the “Outstanding Creative Writer” award by the Janesville Art Alliance for her first book Sherlock Holmes and the Folk Tale Mysteries. She is semi-retired and lives in Evansville, Wisconsin. Ms. Puhl has one daughter, Gayla, and four grandchildren.
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.
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 mainly harmless, as his wife and daughter might concede with a little persuasion.
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.
Charles Veley has loved Sherlock Holmes since boyhood. As a father, he read the entire Canon to his then-ten-year-old daughter at evening story time. Now, this very same daughter, grown up to become acclaimed historical novelist Anna Elliott, has worked with him to develop new adventures in the Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery Series. Charles is also a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and wrote The Pirates of Finance, a new musical in the G&S tradition that won an award at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2013. Other than the “Sherlock and Lucy” series, all of the books on his Amazon Author Page were written when he was a full-time author during the late Seventies and early Eighties. He currently works for United Technologies Corporation, where his main focus is on creating sustainability and value for the company’s large real estate development projects.
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.
The following contributors appear in the companion volume
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
Part VIII - Eliminate the Impossible: 1892-1905
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.
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, and Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street. Derrick resides in Colorado and continues compiling unpublished works by Dr. John H. Watson. For this story, the following students completed research as part of their 7th grade IB project at Century Middle School in Thornton, CO: Dante Avilez-Cruz, Isaiah Buckner, Larissa Garcia, Doramay Jones, Cooper Kehmeier, Brooklyn Ossowski, Conner Phillips, Zoey Pilcher, LaShawn Prince, and Dylan Wright. Without their contribution, this story could not have been written.
Ben Cardall is The Deductionist, a man who has spent the better part of his life in pursuit of the skills of Sherlock Holmes and how much of a reality they are. He spends his days working as a Mentalist and has made it his business to know what others don’t or simply cannot, essentially splitting his time between writing, researching, and testing/performing these feats that were only previously thought to be works of fiction and legend. Contained within is the very first pastiche he has ever written, carefully guided under the expert tutelage of David Marcum.
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 his first, proper steps into the Sherlock Holmes Community. His first published story, “The Adventure of the Travling Corpse”, appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VI: 2017 Annual. 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.
Cindy 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.
