Tony Richards's Blog: 21st Century Holmes, page 2

MY NEW PUBLISHER - ENDEAVOUR MEDIA

In the few decades that I've been writing fiction, my work has been handled by some major traditional publishing houses. Pan and Headline in the UK. Tor Books, Schusters and HarperCollins in the States. And getting a finished manuscript into print used to be a long, slow process involving line edits, copy edits, galley proofs and heaven knows what else. A task lasting at least a year, which is pretty frustrating when you are eager too see your latest fiction out there on the shelves..

But my new publishers - Endeavour Media - are the very model of a modern publishing house. Working only in the fields of eBooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, and doing all the above functions electronically, they brought out a good-looking edition of THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES in less than half the time that a conventional publisher would take.

And when I was unhappy with the book's original cover, they were able to provide me with a better one the very same day.



Great stuff. They've been a real pleasure to work with, and I look forward to bringing out more fiction with them in the near future. More Holmes fiction? Well, let's just say I have a few ideas.

If you're seriously interested in the whole process of writing and getting published, btw, my non-fiction book HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING: THE ART OF CREATING PROFESSIONAL FICTION has just received its first - and excellent - review on Amazon, and is as good a place to start as any.

TOKYO, JAPAN ... A GHOST IN TOKYO

Japan is a terrific country in which to set fiction. And - if you write professionally - a smart location for a story too ... Western editors love Eastern tales and have a tendency to snap them up.


I've spent a good while on the southern island, Kyushu, and even set one of my favorite stories there. It's the tropical part of Japan, so full of golden beaches and tall palm trees they compare it to Hawaii. It's volcanic too, with massive geysers and with parts of the coastline where lava running down into the sea has frozen into vast expanses of surreal pumice sculpture. There's a lot of natural beauty, like the Sekino-o Waterfalls (above). But according to legend, Kyushu is also the place where the Shinto gods settled when then came down to dwell among us, so the island is peppered with amazing features like the Udo Shrine (top), right beside the ocean and partly inside a cave in a cliff.


I have set fiction too in towns and cities on the main island on Honshu. The charming old-time capital Kyoto for instance, with its massive plethora of temples (above) and shrines, its Zen pebble gardens, and even a Shogun's Palace. And the smaller town of Nara with its sacred deer park and its giant Buddha (below).


But 'A Ghost in Tokyo' is set in the nation's huge, thriving and bustling capital. Tokyo has plenty of its own temples and shrines. Most of the center is modern, though, and this tale is set in the Shinjuku district of the city, the nightlife district, so festooned with neon lights and giant television screens it resembles - as Holmes remarks - a scene from Blade Runner.

And Sherlock Holmes is not alone on this occasion. He is paired up with Lieutenant Haruko Minoshi of the 'Keishicho', the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, a woman of tiny stature but enormous intellect, and a 3rd Dan karate black belt into the bargain. A bond of mutual respect grows up between the pair, and I intend to bring her back in later pieces of Holmes fiction.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IN JAPAN

Japan is a terrific country in which to set fiction. And - if you write professionally - a smart location for a story too ... Western editors love Eastern tales and have a tendency to snap them up.


I've never been to the northern island of Hokkaido, but I have spent a good while on the southern island, Kyushu, and even set one of my favorite stories there. It's the tropical part of Japan, so full of golden beaches and tall palm trees they compare it to Hawaii. It's volcanic too, with massive geysers and with parts of the coastline where lava running down into the sea has frozen into vast expanses of surreal pumice sculpture. There's a lot of natural beauty, like the Sekino-o Waterfalls (above). But according to legend, Kyushu is also the place where the Shinto gods settled when then came down to dwell among us, so the island is peppered with amazing features like the Udo Shrine (top), right beside the ocean and partly inside a cave in a cliff.


I have set fiction too in towns and cities on the main island on Honshu. The charming old-time capital Kyoto for instance, with its massive plethora of temples (above) and shrines, its Zen pebble gardens, and even a Shogun's Palace. And the smaller town of Nara with its sacred deer park and its giant Buddha (below).


But the 10th story in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21st CENTURY - 'A Ghost in Tokyo' - is set in the nation's huge, thriving and bustling capital.

Tokyo has plenty of its own temples and shrines. Here's a crowded one during a public holiday.


But most of the center is modern, and this tale is set in the Shinjuku district of the city, the nightlife district, so festooned with neon lights and giant television screens it resembles - as Holmes remarks - a scene from Blade Runner.

And Sherlock Holmes is not alone on this occasion. He is paired up with Lieutenant Haruko Minoshi of the 'Keishicho', the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, a woman of tiny stature but enormous intellect, and a 3rd Dan karate black belt into the bargain. A bond of mutual respect grows up between the pair, and I intend to bring her back in later pieces of Holmes fiction.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SHERLOCK

It was the World FantasyConvention of 2009, San Jose, California. I’d never been to that part of the States before and so I headed out exploring. I was gone a couple of hours, and was finally making my way back to the hotel when I ran into a fellow conventioneer, writer and editor Charles Prepolec who happens to be a total Sherlock Holmes fanatic.And Charles sprang a question on me that left me genuinely stunned.“I’m editing a new collection of Sherlock Holmes stories at the moment – supernatural ones. So, would you like to try submitting one?”What?  I thought, although I did not say it. Because – don’t get me wrong, I love the great detective just as much as the next reader – but it had never occurred to me to personally sit down and write a Holmes tale.But I decided to go away and think about it. On and off over the next couple of months, I thought about it quite a lot. And every time I did that I could see a problem, namely that I don’t write period fiction. I’m simply not an author who is wired that way. The stories that I write are based on places I have been, things I have encountered, people that I’ve met, all reflected and distorted into fantasy in the dark mirror of my imagination.So how to get across that hurdle? I finally saw a possible solution, and it went like this. Back in 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle finally tired of writing about Sherlock Holmes and killed him off in a story called ‘The Final Problem,’ sending him on that infamous plunge down the Reichenbach Falls. But he misjudged the fervor of his audience. The great detective’s fans were having none of it, and pestered Doyle constantly, begging him to bring their hero back.And so eight years later, in 1901, Sir ACD put into print perhaps the best of all his Holmes stories, The Hound of theBaskervilles . He revived the character, in other words. Dragged him back out of the grave.And I thought: Okay then, so he’s effectively immortal. Which means that he could still be around in the present day.And so I sat down at my laptop and began writing my first modern-day Holmes tale. I finished it fairly quickly, emailed it to Charles, and it finally appeared in his anthology next year. But that was hardly the end of it, because I absolutely loved writing that tale. I saw fresh new possibilities and didn’t want to stop. And since Holmes now had an eternity to go on fighting crime, I couldn’t see any slightest reason to confine him to just one location. I had him solving cases all over the globe, in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, Paris, Amsterdam, Japan and Hong Kong, and even Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here is that slew of fiction, gathered into one big book and topped off by a last adventure in which Holmes is called back to his native London.

THE SONORA DESERT, ARIZONA ... THE DESERT KING

The year? 2004. The location? The city of Phoenix, Arizona. The occasion? My very first American convention, World Horror at the Embassy Suites, Phoenix-Scottsdale. I spent a marvelous few days at that convention, making new friends who have lasted for life. It was over all too quickly. But on the final day, my good wife flew out to meet me ... we were traveling on to first Las Vegas and then San Francisco, both of them also to become locations in the book. But we had an afternoon to kill before our plane left. The hotel was advertising Sonoran Desert tours. And so we took one.

A retired military type showed up in a battered old Chevy Silverado SUV and whisked us out of Phoenix into a type of landscape which - well-traveled though I am - I'd never seen before. Giant flowering cacti. Joshua trees. Miles and miles of this, as far as the eye could see, with mountains hanging in the distance like a plume of purple smoke. Our guide gave us some facts about the fauna and the flora there and then proceeded to regale us with bloodcurdling tales about the things that cougars and coyotes had done to some of the local people. "What are these holes?" I asked at one stage, pointing to some fist-sized impressions in the parched brown dirt beside my feet. "Tarantula holes," came the reply. I jumped back pretty fast. Oh, and we were advised to step around bushes too, not over them. Yep, rattlesnakes.

But what a place of monumental, savage beauty. I'll never forget that tour. And the Sonora forms the background to the second - and one of the longest - adventures in the book. In 'The Desert King', Sherlock Holmes is faced with a menacing cult leader who brings down death on anyone who has the courage to oppose him.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ARIZONA

The year? 2004. The location? The city of Phoenix, Arizona. The occasion? My very first American convention, World Horror at the Embassy Suites, Phoenix-Scottsdale, an excellent venue where you get not simply a hotel room but an entire self-contained apartment.

I spent a marvelous few days at that convention, making new friends who have lasted for life and dining out each evening mostly in the company of horror writing legend Ramsey Campbell, top horror editor Stephen Jones, and author and screenplay writer
It was over all too quickly. But on the final day, my good wife flew out to meet me ... we were traveling on to first Las Vegas and then San Francisco, both of them also to become locations in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21st CENTURY.

But we had an afternoon to kill before our plane left. The hotel was advertising Sonoran Desert tours. And so we took one.

A retired military type showed up in a battered old Chevy Silverado SUV and whisked us out of Phoenix into a type of landscape which - well-traveled though I am - I'd never seen before. Giant flowering cacti. Joshua trees. Miles and miles of this, as far as the eye could see, with mountains hanging in the distance like a plume of purple smoke. Our guide gave us some facts about the fauna and the flora there and then proceeded to regale us with bloodcurdling tales about the things that cougars and coyotes had done to some of the local people. "What are these holes?" I asked at one stage, pointing to some fist-sized impressions in the parched brown dirt beside my feet. "Tarantula holes," came the reply. I jumped back pretty fast. Oh, and we were advised to step around bushes too, not over them. Yep, rattlesnakes.

But what a place of monumental, savage beauty. I'll never forget that tour. And the Sonora forms the background to the second - and one of the longest - adventures in the book, 'The Desert King.'

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA ...THE TERROR IN THE PARK

It's one of my favorite places, an amazing city ... but let's deal with a couple of the down-sides first. Walking around KL is like walking through a giant sauna; I've never been to anywhere so humid in my entire life. And - when I was there at least - I was obliged to put on large amounts of mosquito repellent every day due to the risk of dengue fever. But those are very minor obstacles indeed for a true British traveler. We go out in the midday sun, don'tcha know. And once you step outside your hotel, you find yourself in a quite fascinating place.

It's a city of huge variety and contrasts, an oil-boom city with very modern buildings - best exemplified by the Petronas twin towers (above) - sitting next to old colonial architecture, street markets, and picturesque districts such as Chinatown. It's mixed in other ways as well. Malaysia's officially a Muslim country, but the population is actually so diverse that along with the mosques you will find Buddhist and Hindu temples, Christian churches, and even a synagogue as you make your way through KL's busy streets. And all those cultures lived beside each other peaceably when I was there. As Holmes says in this tale: "An example to us all." I found the people of Kuala Lumpur to be charmingly friendly, helpful and hospitable throughout my stay ... and let's face it, it's the people who make a city what it is.

But the best landmark of all is on the outskirts of the place. The Batu Caves are limestone caves, the largest one reached only by a flight of 272 steps, those guarded by a giant statue of the war deity Murugan.


And once you are inside, there are a succession of ornate Hindu shrines, all of them cloaked partly in shadow but with some filtered daylight coming down from fissures high up in the ceiling. A breathtaking, mysterious and hugely atmospheric place to be.

I just had to set one of my Holmes adventures in marvelous Kuala Lumpur. In 'The Terror in the Park,' workers in the Petronas Towers are being mysteriously killed as they walk home at night through Kuala Lumpur City Center Park. Holmes teams up with the local police to put a stop to it.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IN MALAYSIA

Each of the 13 mysteries in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21st CENTURY is set in a different part of our modern world. And they are all parts of the world I've visited and know.

Taking them in no particular order, one of the most favored locations that I've ever set a piece of fiction in is Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia and the setting for the fourth adventure in the book, 'The Terror in the Park.'

A truly amazing city ... but let's deal with a couple of the down-sides first. Walking around KL is like walking through a giant sauna; I've never been to anywhere so humid in my entire life. And - when I was there at least - I was obliged to put on large amounts of mosquito repellent every day due to the risk of dengue fever.

But those are very minor obstacles indeed for a true British traveler. We go out in the midday sun, don'tcha know. And once you step outside your hotel, you find yourself in a quite fascinating place.

It's a city of huge variety and contrasts, an oil-boom city with very modern buildings - best exemplified by the Petronas twin towers (above) - sitting next to old colonial architecture, street markets, and picturesque districts such as Chinatown.

It's mixed in other ways as well. Malaysia's officially a Muslim country, but the population is actually so diverse that along with the mosques you will find Buddhist and Hindu temples, Christian churches, and even a synagogue as you make your way through KL's busy streets. And all those cultures lived beside each other peaceably when I was there. As Holmes says in this tale: "An example to us all." I found the people of Kuala Lumpur to be charmingly friendly, helpful and hospitable throughout my stay ... and let's face it, it's the people who make a city what it is.

But the best landmark of all is on the outskirts of the place. The Batu Caves are limestone caves, the largest one reached only by a flight of 272 steps, those guarded by a giant statue of the war deity Murugan.


And once you are inside, there are a succession of ornate Hindu shrines, all of them cloaked partly in shadow but with some filtered daylight coming down from fissures high up in the ceiling. A breathtaking, mysterious and hugely atmospheric place to be.

I just had to set one of my Holmes adventures in marvelous Kuala Lumpur.

SON OF A CUMBERBATCH?

By Benedict_Cumberbatch_filming_Sherlock.jpg: Fat Les from London, UKderivative work: RanZag (talk) - Benedict_Cumberbatch_filming_Sherlock.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

And by now, you're most probably wondering what influence the hugely popular BBC series Sherlock  had on the creation of THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21st CENTURY. Well, dear reader, the answer is ... none at all.

I was originally invited to create a Sherlock Holmes story by writer and editor Charles Prepolec whilst we were both attending the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California in late October 2009. It took me a while of reflection, but I finally started work on it that year, and completed the final draft of my first Sherlock Holmes adventure - The House of Blood - on the 23rd of January, 2010. I promptly emailed it to Charles and his co-editor J.R. Campbell. They accepted it, and it appeared next year in their terrific anthology Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes . But I enjoyed the writing of that tale so much that I went on to pen 12 more Sherlock Holmes adventures.

In comparison with which, the first of the TV Sherlock series - 'A Study in Pink' - only appeared on the BBC on 25th July 2010, a full six months after I had completed my first mystery.

A case, dear reader, of the parallel development of a similar notion. It happens all the time when it comes to the written word. Elementary really.

Find out more about these exciting adventures here.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IS BACK WITH US!

We all know that Sherlock Holmes didn't really die when he went down the Reichenbach Falls. No, he reappeared 8 years later to face his greatest case, The Hound of the Baskervilles. And - being so very hard to kill - he is still with us to this very day, travelling the world and solving impossible mysteries. THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21st CENTURY chronicles 13 of those, pitting the Great Detective against adversaries human, supernatural, and - in one case - not even of this world.

Find out more about this exciting new Sherlock Holmes collection from Endeavour Media here.