Derrick Belanger's Blog: Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Ramblings of a Sherlockian - Posts Tagged "macdougall-twins"

Never in a million years did I think that my first book signing would be a smashing success. Never did I expect to sell out of the first volume of my A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural, almost sell out of volume 2, and then sell all 20 copies of my children's Sherlock Holmes chapter book The Amazing Airship Adventure (Macdougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes Book 1). In fact, moments before leaving for the event, I was thinking I might be in trouble.

Right before I left, the texts, Facebook posts, and e-mails started rolling in. Sorry, I forgot about your event...or, came down with a bad cold...or something's come up. I'm not saying that to make anyone feel guilty nor to criticize. I've had things come up in my life, and I've missed events I had every intent of going to. It just got me in the mode of, "What if no one shows up?" I'm sure every author has those jitters at their first signing, and for some, I'm sure those fears never go away even if they are rich and famous.

When I arrived at the Bookbar in Denver, I am pleased to say I was greeted warmly, and joined two other authors at a table right in front of the business entryway. I sat in the center with author Dean K. Miller to my left, and author and professor Leslie Rapparlie to my right. We got our books out, were served a complimentary glass of wine, set up shop, and got ready for the rush.

And what a rush it was! I was pleased to see so many friends and coworkers arrive to buy my books and cheer me on. I was shocked at how many people I didn't know bought my book, talked with me, and gave me a thumbs up. One customer asked if I would consider co-authoring a children's book they were working on; another told me how, because of the anthology, my name would forever be linked with that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; finally, another told me that the MacDougall Twins mysteries were filling a void in the Sherlockian pastiches, that of stories aimed for young chapter book readers.

Copies of all three of my books were flying out the door! In the middle of the book signing, I had to quickly run to my car as I was selling out of books fast. I had left some extra copies of the books in my car as a backup in case I ran out. Honestly, I didn't think I would actually need to restock, but had them there to be safe. It was good that I had that foresight. I restocked on the MacDougall Twins only to have my stock quickly sell out again.

When I went to the clerk, Tommy, at the end of the night, I asked him if this was common. He smiled and told me that the last time he saw an author sell that much in that amount of time was Peter Heller, and he's a New York Times bestselling author!

When I finally left the Bookbar, I was dizzy, a little drunk, and a lot in shock. It is a wonderful feeling for an author to have their book published, to know someone in the world found their work valuable enough to sink money into it, and put it out for the world to see. It is an even better feeling to have family and friends read one's work and give you positive feedback. But the feeling one gets when people you don't know buy your book and tell you how much they enjoy it is indescribably wonderful. That was the feeling, maybe even a touch beyond, I left the Bookbar with that evening.

I cannot thank the Bookbar enough for putting on this event. Unfortunately, many local bookstores have taken it upon themselves to charge local authors to stock their books and even more money to have signings. This strikes me as a lose/ lose proposition. It keeps local talent out of local bookstores and drives more business to that of the online retailers. The Bookbar, I am proud to say, truly supports local authors. They worked well with all three of the authors that night, provided us with spirits, and encouraged us to leave copies of our books for sale in their store. I look forward to future events at this amazing establishment, including reading at a storytime. More information on that at a later date...

I also want to take a moment and give kudos to my fellow authors at the Bookbar event. Dean K. Miller is an air traffic controller who publishes short stories, poems, and essays on life's quiet, profound moments. His latest book, And Then I Smiled is available at the Bookbar, other area bookstores, and on Amazon. Leslie Rapparlie is a Professor of Composition at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her book Writing and Experiential Education is an excellent resource for all teachers interested in creative and experiential writing. It is also available at the Bookbar and on Amazon.

I wish both these authors well on their long and profitable writing careers. I look forward to building my relationship with the Bookbar and encourage all shoppers in the Denver metro area to make the Bookbar their one stop shop for all their literary needs.

Cheers,

Derrick Belanger
http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...

http://www.belangerbooks.com/

You're probably wondering if you read that title correctly A Sherlock Holmes teaching award? Really? Yes, really. The Beacon Society, a Scion Society of the Baker Street Irregulars, gives this award once a year to individuals or groups for "exemplary educational experiences and other significant activities exposing young people to the Sherlock Holmes stories." I was honored last week to discover a fellow teacher nominated me for this prestigious award.

For more on the Beacon Award, see the link below: http://www.beaconsociety.com/BeaconAw...

Book Release Party

I'm flying out to the Boston area today for a book release party. The party is actually in Manchester, NH, not to be confused with Manchester, England, which is a real city. This one should be interesting because it is a combined Halloween costume party and Book release party. You can probably already guess my costume.

Look for pictures of people dressed up and getting their books signed to be posted on the Amazon author page and on Facebook early next week.

Upcoming Blog

October 25th - Interview with author Geri Schear on her new book A Biased Judgement.

One of the many bright spots of being an author is getting to know other authors especially at events like book signings. I had the pleasure of meeting Dean K. Miller at the Local Author Happy Hour at Denver's BookBar in October. It was a chaotic and fun night, and Dean and I hit it off pretty well. I invited him to be a part of my author interview series. I thought you would enjoy hearing from a non-Sherlockian author, and just so you know, I do manage to get in one question on Doyle. :)

1. Your book And Then I Smiled: Reflections on a Life Not Yet Complete combines poetry and prose into a work on life's reflections. What made you want to write this book and produce it in this format?

I was in a mid-first novel slump and began looking at ways to reignite my muse. I began investigating (like Mr. Holmes) clues on the road to publishing. A friend had just started her indie publishing company Hot Chocolate Press (www.hotchocolatepress.com) and was looking for a book to launch under her label. I had all the work written though there was much polishing to do. We set an aggressive timetable and spent a few months organizing, sequencing stories, doing cover art, etc. The book was not an original "I want to write this type of book" plan, but rather came about via circumstances and luck. Also, a mixed genre book is a very tough sell, even to small presses. With that in mind, I decided to go the indie/self publish route.

2. Your illustrated, short story e-book The Odyssey of the Monk continues your theme of being happy and content in the quiet moments in life. What are the times in life where you feel the most content, happy, and at peace?

With our three children now young adults and away from home, having them around is always the best source of contentedness and happiness, though it's rarely peaceful. On a personal level, my heart and soul belongs to the ocean beaches and salty seas. Moving to Colorado in 1999, I found a second home fly fishing the Big Thompson Canyon. It was there that I rediscovered my urge to write. Most of the essays and stories in And Then I Smiled . . . came from time spent fly fishing and spending solitary time with the river and all who inhabit that special place.

3. I have to ask at least one question related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In his book, The Mystery of Cloomber, Doyle has Buddhist monks seeking revenge (or at the very least, Karmic retribution) for the needless murder of a Llama who was about to reach enlightenment. In your own meditations, have you found times when you've gone away from peace and wanted to seek karmic revenge or at least wished ill of another person?

During much of 2000 through 2011 I did a lot of reading, study of various religious practice. Buddhism had a strong draw and I read several books and began a meditation practice. Since beginning that voyage, I can say with certainty that I have never sought karmic revenge on anyone or anything. Even before then, I don't recall purposely wishing ill will on anyone, though I'm sure there are things I certainly could/should atone for. But the idea for a story is a great plot, even as disturbing as it is.

4. Tell us about your new book coming soon, Echoes: Reflections Through Poetry and Verse.

Though my first book And Then I Smiled . . . contains 10 original poems, Echoes is my first poetry exclusive book. The work holds some of my earliest work (1980) as well as poems completed in mid-2014 and selected for publication in two upcoming issues of Torrid Literature Journal. With poetry I find myself more willing to explore darker emotions and challenging themes with a rawness that comes from fewer words and tighter spaces. Also with this work (and my Ebook short story) I worked with artist/author April J. Moore and enjoyed the mixed media collaboration.

5. Any last thoughts?

Every day of writing can be seen as a challenge, but luckily I'm still day-job fortunate. Retirement is looming and I look forward to a little more time to focus on writing. For now, I'm getting back into my first novel for a 2016 release (if all goes well.) Thanks for having me on your site and best of luck to you.

For more on Dean K Miller, visit his website at www.deankmiller.com.

Sherlockian Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
Visit Derrick's Amazon Page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...

Release day! Yes, today marks the release of A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Revolutionary Stories of fear and the Supernatural, Volume 2. Now, everyone can read the complete Study in Terror anthology, enjoy Doyle's weird side, and learn about his importance in the horror, supernatural, and thriller genres. To commemorate, I interviewed Volume 2 contributor, Professor Joel Jensen who wrote about the horror aspect of Doyle's (sort of) first mystery novel, The Mystery of Cloomber.

1. How did you get involved in The Study in Terror anthology?

Well, the simple answer is that I became involved because I was asked! And this was a fun opportunity to think carefully about a neglected Doyle story, so I took the opportunity.

2. Well, that was a straightforward answer. How about this? Your focus for The Mystery of Cloomber in your essay is on its horror aspects. Why didn't you want to focus on the mystery side of the story?

I think the Mystery in the mystery of Cloomber is very thinly veiled, despite the title. Doyle could hardly have imagined that readers would be remain in the dark until the apotheosis unfolds in the final pages. What's more interesting is the unusual source of fright in the story. Doyle is using the frightening foes - the Buddhist monks - as a way of teasing our moral suppositions. The tale is frightening because it supposes that the moral truths we hold dear rely upon dark underpinnings; they're built in, as it were. This should frighten us. The story isn't built around a whodunit at all - we know from the very beginning that the General has committed some terrible deed in the past which is coming back to haunt him. The force of the story is in the dreadful moral weight with which he receives his comeuppance.

3. The novel mainly deals with Buddhists seeking revenge. In your studies of Buddhism, have you encountered any history of revenge or, at the very least, karmic retribution?

Well, yes and no. One can look at current events in Myanmar, in which the majority Buddhist population is seeking to remove by force a Muslim minority. This is a dreadful set of circumstances, and to observers in the West, we look on somewhat baffled. Buddhists are supposed to be peaceniks, right? Of course, we're colored by our encounters with American Buddhists - maybe the gentle hippie you see at the coffee shop, or perhaps by familiarity with the Dali Lama, who has been a visible voice for nonviolence for half a century. And strictly speaking, insofar as Buddhism can be said to have a doctrine, its a pacifistic religion. So, what's happening in Myanmar? Well, this is a case of humans just being humans. People want an excuse to act violently toward people they fear, and they do so regardless of religious principles. There was a long period of time in Japan in which Mt. Hiei's Buddhist monks dominated the political scene because any time something happened that the didn't like, the headed down the mountain and burned Kyoto, under the pretense of teaching their political opponents impermanence. But this should hardly seem surprising - Christianity is explicitly pacifistic too, but we're all familiar with the long history of violence sanctioned by religious authorities. But also because we're familiar with Buddhism primarily as that peacenik religion, Doyle's Cloomber is surprising. What's up with these Buddhists bent on violent revenge? Of course, this has nothing to do with "Buddhism" proper, merely a Doyle-ization of the religion for literary purposes. Doyle was actually pretty familiar with Buddhism, or at least with Indian Buddhist practices. I don't know if he really believed that he was accurately portraying Buddhist doctrine - we probably couldn't know such a thing - but we can probably chalk it up to artistic license.

4. You've written a book There is an X, X is a Sandwich, on the Philosophy of the sandwich. What led to you writing about such an odd yet fun topic?

This is a bit of a long story, but I'll try to keep it brief. I was asked to write a short essay on the history of the sandwich for an artist friend of mine, Scott Nedrelow, whose art studio doubled as the Sandwich Bar For Peace. He had this idea of making a coffee table type book featuring works in the permanent collection, and wanted a short essay on sandwiches. Actually, the original idea was that the book would look and feel like on of those catalogs that corporations put together, like annual reports, that they print 600 of to give out after the Christmas party, but they end up piled in the corner and no one looks at them. So, the idea was that I would write an essay that would actually be unreadable - it would be so boring, you know "the history of the sandwich" that it would just be unread catalog filler taking up space. Then he would print out all these catalogs and have them piled in the corner of the studio. It was a very weird idea, but I said sure, it sounds like my kind of project. So, initially I never intended the essay to be read, it was just something funny to do. But as I began writing the essay, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into the problem of how a sandwich should be defined, that I couldn't finish the essay. It kept getting longer and longer, and I kept realizing that there were more angles I hadn't considered yet, so I kept writing. Finally a year later I told Scott, well I'm done And he basically said, oh that? That was a weird idea; I gave up on that ages ago. But lets try to publish your book on its own. So we did. It still strikes me as strange that such an odd philosophical problem - how should we define this ordinary mundane thing - should end up being interesting, and really its basically unresolvable. In about 100 pages or so, I feel like I only scratched the surface. But it's been great fun, both the writing and the response.

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule for the interview. Have a great end to the semester.

To purchase <1>A Study in Terror...Volume 2 via Amazon, follow this link for the Kindle edition http://www.amazon.com/Study-Terror-Re...), and this link for the paperback edition (http://www.amazon.com/Study-Terror-Re...).

Joel K Jensen is the author of There Exists an X, X is a Sandwich, available from Sandwich Bar Press. He is interested in applying the methodologies of deductive logic to everyday life with both humor and intellectual rigor. Jensen studied philosophy and architecture at the University of Colorado, and teaches philosophy at North Hennepin Community College. He lives in Minneapolis.

Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.

There are good Sherlockians, great Sherlockians, and then there is David Marcum, the most knowledgeable Sherlockian I've had the pleasure of meeting in my brief career as a MX author. I first met David via e-mail when I reviewed his exceptional pastiche mashup Sherlock Holmes In Montague Street Volume 1. Since then I have corresponded with David on about a weekly basis. He has been a great mentor and friend. He's also one hell of a writer. Below, in honor of the release of the complete edition of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes (http://tinyurl.com/luanxjv), I have included the first part of a two part interview with Mr. Marcum.

1. Out of all the books you could have written, why did you decide to write a Sherlock Holmes short story collection?

First of all, I want to thank you for asking me to participate in your interview series. Where I live, in eastern Tennessee, there isn’t a lot of Sherlockian fellowship going on, so it’s great to be able to communicate in this way. I also want to warn or apologize in advance to the readers about some of the answers that turned into essays – when Derrick said that I “can take as much space as you need answering the questions,” I believed him.

Now, to the first question. It’s a two part answer. The short version is that I’ve been a huge fan and collector of stories related to Sherlock Holmes since I was ten, and I wanted to add a thread to the Great Holmes Tapestry. As a boy, I saw lists of other people’s pastiches, in de Waal’s World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and other places, and I wanted to be included with that group.

The longer version is that I’ve simply wanted to write since I was a kid. I remember borrowing my dad’s typewriter to compose additional volumes of The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators when I was eight or nine years old. (I still have some of them. The chapters are about a paragraph long each.)

My first real attempt at writing was during my first career, working as a Federal Investigator in an obscure government agency that eventually shut down and disappeared completely. In the early 90’s, after the Cold War was over, it became clear that our agency was in trouble, leading to a lot of internal bad feelings. In order to keep us going for a while longer, my fellow investigators and I were being forced to travel around the country for great chunks of time, loaned to other offices. I was in Albuquerque for a couple of months, far from home, and one day while driving around I got the idea for a story about what would happen if some of the people within my agency had been running a really evil secret scam for years, and now that the end was in sight, they were forced to make one last score – namely, stealing technology from the legendary plants in Oak Ridge, TN, near where I live. On impulse, I turned the car into an Albuquerque Walmart and bought a pack of paper and a typewriter, and spent every remaining night in my room while in Albuquerque knocking out a novel. I finished it when I got home. Of course, the hero who stopped these guys was a thinly disguised version of me, and it was fun to make some of my bosses and co-workers evil agents for the Russians. I’d started out trying to be a new Clive Cussler, but it ended up more along the lines of Ludlum or Craig Thomas. Creating the book was very cathartic, but writing it was all that I ever did about it. I never pursued publishing it, although it still exists in the form of 600+ typewritten pages, stored in my old government briefcase and shoved under the bed.

Later, after the government job ended, I went back to school to get a second degree in order to become a Civil Engineer. After being laid off from an engineering company in early 2008 at the start of the Great Recession, I thought about writing a Holmes story while I had the time to do so. I had always wanted to do that, and I’d tried to write a few of those along the way as well, but never to completion.

I realized that I’d always speculated about the true origins of Solar Pons, a Holmes-like detective created by August Derleth, featured in over 60 stories, and set in the 1920’s and 1930’s. (If you haven’t read any Solar Pons, you really should!) I had finally figured out to my own satisfaction who Pons really was, and how he was connected to Holmes, and I decided to write about that. But that story, which eventually became “The Adventure of the Other Brother,” was too intimidating, so I sat down and decided to write another one first just for practice. That was what ended up becoming “The Adventure of the Least Winning Woman,” the first story in what ended up becoming The Papers of Sherlock Holmes.

Once I started writing, the other stories just flowed out. I write very organically, with no outline. I’ve talked to a few other writers about this, and some do the same thing - just let the characters go and see what happens. For instance, I simply imagine Holmes and Watson sitting and talking, and I let them talk, transcribing what they say. I’m as surprised as they are when there is a ring at the bell and some client appears at their door. My writing method is similar to when Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, is telling Watson how he studied a map of Devonshire all day, and that his mind was there “in spirit.” As Holmes says, "My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.” I don’t smoke, but when I start writing, I go into the zone, and come out three or four hours later with five or ten pages written, and all of my coffee is gone. It’s amazing to start with nothing, and come out the other end with something. Even though it needs polishing, it now exists.

Initially, I just showed the stories to my family. In 2011, I got the itch to have them published, and worked with George Vanderburgh at the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. He published them that fall, and some people actually bought them. In early 2013, I communicated with Gerard Kelly, a former Battered Silicon author who had switched to MX Publishing. He told me about his positive experience, so I reached out to Steve Emecz about putting out a new MX edition of The Papers, and there has been no looking back. We reworked the original book into two volumes, and now it’s been recombined back into a new hardcover edition, made into an audiobook, and there are Russian and forthcoming Indian editions as well. I’ve been very happy with the whole process, and Steve has been great to work with. Also, Bob Gibson has been exceptional. He took a photo of Holmes and Watson in the sitting room that I had come up with and made some incredible covers out of it. All in all, I highly recommend them.

2. Your story, "The Haunting of Sutton House," is unique in that you have two different mysteries from two different times in Watson's life recounted together. Why did you take such an unusual approach in recounting these two stories as one?

As before, there are two answers. The first involves playing The Game, which approaches the Canon as if it presents actual, historical events, and that Holmes, Watson, and the rest were real people. Sometimes Watson disguised names or events, but the basic facts that he presented were real. I’ve always played The Game quite seriously, especially when I was able to go to England in 2013, and certainly when working on these books. When looking at things that way, as I explain in the book’s introduction, I’m just the editor, Watson was the writer, and if the narrative tells two mysteries, then it’s because Watson wanted to do it that way. I feel like I’m channeling what I like to call the Great Watsonian Oversoul. That’s what I believe all the other “editors” of Watson’s notes are tapping into as well.

The other answer relates back to how I write. It’s free-flowing, without a plan. Back in 2008, when I was laid off from work and first wanted to see if I could write a pastiche or two, I would do my job-hunting chores in the morning, and then sit down and write until early afternoon. I didn’t have any outlines, but would just see where the story went. At some point during those weeks, I was eating lunch in front of the TV when I ran across one of those shows where a team, consisting of two or three people, visits a supposedly haunted house or building. This particular episode related to Sutton House, a real location in east London. I normally don’t watch those shows, but as I was open-minded then for story ideas, and since this was about London, I stuck in a tape. A few days later, I watched the show, and made notes about the ghosts that supposedly lived in the house, and also a very rough sketch of the layout of the building. Then I sat down and started writing. I knew the story was going to be about this haunted building, but that’s all that I knew. When the client initially showed up and told his story, I met him for the first time along with Holmes and Watson, and I simply heard what they heard. The rest was still a mystery. And then – unexpectedly to me – Holmes left for a while and Watson remained behind in Baker Street and started daydreaming about a case they had just completed. That came out of nowhere. This daydream turned into the flashback portion, which ended up alternating and paralleling the main case at Sutton House.

This experience has happened since then, as well. I now have a new set of stories “edited” for the next short story collection, which I hope will be published some time in 2015. One of the stories was originally supposed to be a short entry, and then suddenly one of the characters mentioned out of the blue how the current case might relate to Holmes’s past involvement in solving the Reckless Goings-on of the Suicide Club. I had no idea that was going to happen, and it opened up a whole new level to the story. I knew that I had to follow it through, and I’m glad that I was just letting the characters talk, because I might never have heard it otherwise.

“The Haunting of Sutton House” turned out to be one of the more popular stories in the first book. I was in touch with Larry Albert at Imagination Theater, a nationally syndicated radio drama group, and he encouraged me to write a script from the flashback portion of the story. It was aired nationally in November 2013 as part of their series, “The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” which is authorized by the Conan Doyle Estate. It was an incredible thrill to be able to add to the very long radio history of Mr. Holmes, and my second script from the book, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle,” is being broadcast the nationally the week of November 23rd, 2014.

In September 2013, I was able to go on my trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England and Scotland, and while in London I was able to go to Sutton House. While in London, I only visited sites related to Holmes, the Canon, and many of the better pastiches. (For instance, I went to The Tower, because there are many good pastiches set there, but I did not go on the London Eye – there’s nothing Sherlockian about it.) I showed up at Sutton House in my deerstalker, which I’ve worn everywhere from fall to spring as my only hat since I was nineteen years old, and I certainly wore it everywhere while I was in England. I did NOT tell the nice people at Sutton House that I’d written a story about the house being haunted, because I didn’t think that they would appreciate it. (I had a cup of tea in their tearoom, which has some books on a shelf, and I peeked to see if my book was there, but it wasn’t. Even now, they may not yet know about the story that I set there.) It was great fun to wander through the house and see places that I had described without having been there. And it made me realize the touch of ignorance or arrogance that is involved in writing about someplace as specific as a real house that I hadn’t actually visited before.

3. In "The Adventure of the Missing Missing Link," you have Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, and Doyle involved with the Piltdown man hoax. There is a theory that Doyle was involved in this hoax. What are your thoughts on this theory and did this theory inspire your story?

I actually only became aware of the theory about Doyle’s possible involvement at some point after the story was written. This is yet another example of not having a clue at the beginning where the story is going, and just running along after the characters to see where they led me. The idea for this story actually came from my wife, who is a librarian. She had seen something about Sir William Osler, a famous doctor in the early twentieth century who had done much to reform the way that students are taught in medical schools. She asked me if there had been a pastiche where Holmes and Osler met. I knew that of all the thousands of them that I’ve read, I hadn’t encountered one – which doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist somewhere. When it was time to write the next story, her question stuck in my head. I found some information Osler, saw what time-frame he was in, and realized that it was during a very important period of Holmes’s life, when he was undercover as Altamont in the years before the Great War.

So I started writing the story by having Watson on a visit to Holmes’s Sussex retirement villa in 1912, and Holmes asks Watson if he has heard of Osler. It turns out that Holmes has been requested to come to Oxford to consult the man on some matter. At that point I still didn’t know why, but I had read that Osler was something of an expert on bones. That led to the connection to the discovery of the Piltdown Man, which I knew was from around that time period as well. I checked, and it fit perfectly. In the story, Doyle’s involvement in the hoax came about when I included him because he was living in Sussex at that time near the scene of the action. It also served to remind and reinforce the idea that he was Watson’s literary agent.

Later, I saw something about the possibility that Doyle might possibly be responsible for the whole Piltdown Caper. (There is another Holmes pastiche, Sherlock Holmes and the Skull of Death by Robert E. McClellan, which also touches on the Piltdown matter, but it uses the discovery of the bones as a jumping-off place for a different story.) I had sort of borrowed the idea of using a hoax, and the concept of all the other contingency hoaxes being constructed by Mycroft’s department, from an old Clive Cussler book, Vixen 03, where the characters talk about all of the various scenarios that governments concoct to plan against their enemies and even their friends. (In spite of my Holmes obsession, books about him aren’t the only things that I read. I was reading Clive Cussler’s novels way back when there were only four of them out there. If you’ve seen how much space Cussler’s titles occupy in bookstores now, you know that I’m talking about a long time ago.)

4. For your stories, "The Brother's Request," and "The Madman's Ceremony," you place the setting in your home state of Tennessee, bringing in the historical town of Rugby as well as your own family. Part of the fun is implying that you are related to Dr. Watson and even Basil Rathbone. What made you decide to set a Sherlock Holmes story within your family's history with real family members as characters?

Years before I started writing these stories – or “editing” Watson’s notes – and when I was going back to school part-time to become a Civil Engineer, I started using the internet for the first time. I would kill time between classes in the library or computer lab exploring, and naturally, I was usually trying to find things related to Holmes. There were a lot fewer websites then, and searches were much more primitive, especially because I didn’t know how to search. My wife is a reference librarian with a couple of master’s degrees, and she nudged me in the right direction a few times in order to tease out things, even though it usually meant more Holmes books or stories arriving on our doorstep.

I’m always looking for more Holmes stories to read and collect. Back then, there were just a few sites with fan-fictions and online stories, mostly linked through Sherlockian.net, run by Chris Redmond. I had access to free printing in the library, and since I paid a lot of student fees to the school for things that I never ever used as a part-time adult student, such as intramural athletic fees, I felt no guilt at all when printing all of these stories whenever I could find them.

One of the items that I found on the internet was a reprint of a story called “Sherlock Holmes and the Brown Mountain Lights” by James McKay Morton. (I think that the website where it lived has long since vanished.) It described a visit by Holmes and Watson to Linville, NC in 1921. That’s just a couple of hours or so over the Great Smoky Mountains from where I live in eastern Tennessee. I had visited there before, and it was fun for me to think that Holmes and Watson had gotten that close to my home. But that’s where I left the whole idea for quite a while.

I had always been vaguely aware that one line of my ancestors was from the Watson line, but at some point it hit me for real that I actually really did have Watson blood in me. Of course, there are many, many Watsons in the world, but still it was a fun thing to realize. My great-grandmother, the one who ended up being in the story, was Rebecca Watson Marcum (1874-1927). Her father was James Watson (1851-1930). His father, my great-great-great grandfather Hiram Watson (1825-1913), was the one who came over from England as a child, around 1830. His parents in England were William and Rebecca Watson, and I don’t know anything past that point, including where they came from. If anyone out there has more information about them, it would be much appreciated.

When I started writing the stories, finishing one and then looking for ideas for the next, it occurred to me that since Holmes and Watson had been close to my area of the world in 1921, why wouldn’t Watson decide to go on across the mountains, looking for a long-lost cousin? Sadly, in the Watson papers that I found and “edited,” he didn’t actually include a diagram showing exactly how the family connection exists, so I just have to take his word for it that he had a good reason to venture off into the Tennessee wilderness of the early 1920’s to find my great-grandmother. (If I had realized at the time that her father, James Watson, was still alive when the story was set, I would have included him as well, but it didn’t work out that way.) Mostly Holmes and Watson spend the story in the company of my paternal grandfather, William Calvin “Willie” Marcum, Rebecca Watson Marcum’s son.

I set the story where Watson first encounters my ancestors, “The Brother’s Request,” in the small town of Oneida, where my dad was from, and where my distant Watson cousins lived and still live. I was somewhat familiar with the place, as well as the area outside of town in what is now the Big South Fork National Recreation Area. It’s where they all lived in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. When I started writing about it, I didn’t have any plan regarding the Holmes flashback segment, detailing his earlier visit to the area in 1892 during the Great Hiatus. It only became known to me when he started telling about it while they traveled. It turned out that he had been around the nearby Utopian community of Rugby during its hey-day in the early 1890’s, and that became an important feature in his narrative.

After writing the story where Watson meets his long-lost relatives, and getting Holmes and Watson that close to where I was born and still live, I found that I wanted them to come all the way to my hometown as well. So I wrote the next story, “The Madman’s Ceremony.” As I said in the book’s introduction, if I hadn’t yet gotten to go to England to walk where they walked, I had no shame in finding out that they had come here, to walk where I walk.

At the time I was writing the stories, it was never with publication in mind. Therefore, I put in a lot of visits to local areas with great personal association, mainly for the entertainment of my wife and son. Various buildings are mentioned where I have lived or worked or attended school. The place with the cave at the end of the story is still here in a city park, although it is really a low spot by a large rocky outcropping that floods in wet weather. My son and I used to tell each other stories about how there must be a lost cave under it somewhere, and that got worked into the book. There hadn’t really been a crime in the earlier Tennessee story, “The Brother’s Request,” so I tried to make this story much more adventurous and dangerous.

In the second of the stories in Tennessee, this one set in my hometown, I had Holmes and Watson encounter my other grandfather, whose name was Rathbone. In one of the old Holmes radio shows from the 1940’s, Holmes indicates that he is related to the Rathbones. Since Watson found his own distant cousins in the first story, Holmes finds some of his relatives in the second, although that ends up being a very minor point in the story.

When I finally decided to submit the stories for publication, I was hesitant about including these two, since they were so personal, and they involved inclusion of real family members, as well as visits to real places. However, I realized that many Holmes pastiches by other authors have the two characters traveling to places that are probably actually in those authors’ stomping grounds, although the reader may not realize it. This was just a little more blatant. And also, I’d put a lot of effort into these stories, and the book would be much shorter without them. In the end they were published too, and no one seems to mind. Well, except for one reviewer who didn’t see the fun that I had by writing about family connections from me to both Holmes and Watson, spreading out in different directions.

5. This has been called my meanest question, but I ask it of every Sherlockian. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?

It is a mean question, but it’s a good question. It makes one really think about the answer, instead of just tossing something off. It’s very difficult, and I don’t have an answer that is totally satisfying to me, because it’s a different answer every day. And you didn’t think I could just answer the question without leading up to it, did you?

I assume that you mean that I should pick a story from the original Canon, but I don’t think of Holmes as being limited in that way. When I first started reading about Holmes in the mid-1970’s, it was because I saw part of the pastiche film A Study in Terror (1965) on television, and was then prompted to go dig out an abridged version of The Adventures that I had back in my room, previously untouched. And even a couple of years before that, I had read a Solar Pons story called “The Adventure of the Grice-Paterson Curse” in a children’s anthology, so my mind was initially introduced to the Holmes-and-Watson style by first enjoying Solar Pons and Dr. Parker. (Again, seek out Solar Pons and read about him!)

The first Holmes story that I actually remember reading was “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and even then it resonated somehow. No matter what else I read over the years – and I’ve read and still read a lot of stuff by other authors in addition to the Holmes stories – I’ve always returned to Holmes, and I’m always reading a Holmes story concurrently with a book by some other author.

The Canon is just a tiny percentage of the whole Holmes Spectrum. I’ve been reading and re-reading all of my collected Holmes stories for years, and organizing them into a massive Chronology of the man’s life – not just the Canon, but every legitimate traditional Holmes story I can find. When I re-read now, I think of Holmes’s life as a whole giant gestalt, and not just defined by sixty “official” stories and a few favorites by a limited number of authors.

Very soon after my initial dip into The Adventures, back in 1975, I came across a copy of The Seven-Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, given out at school by the RIF (Reading is Fundamental) Program, just a year or so after its initial publication. I didn’t realize that I was on the front edge of that era’s great Sherlockian Reawakening which had started with that very book. By reading it, before I’d even read very much of the Canon at all, my mind was being stretched and influenced by a pastiche. I saw that Meyer had also written another Holmes story, The West End Horror. I convinced my mom to buy it for me on a trip to purchase school clothes, and I remember starting it eagerly while sitting on the floor of the Boys Department in Sears, by a rack of jeans.

The point of all of that is to say that as I was finding Holmes, I was absorbing pastiches as I easily as I did the Canon, with equal enjoyment. I realized fairly quickly that most of The Seven-Percent Solution ended up being unacceptable due to its contradictions with the Canon, but The West End Horror blew my mind at the time, and I enjoyed it better than I did some of the original stories. (I was lucky enough to tell Nicholas Meyer that when I met him a few years ago at a Sherlockian conference and got him to sign my copy of it. Many references to that book say that it’s a Holmes-versus-The Ripper novel, but it’s actually set in 1895, and the victims are actors and theatre critics and not Whitechapel prostitutes.) It was the perfect story to help set the Holmes hook even deeper into my lip.

As a side note, I should mention that I’ve always had a unique connection to reading mystery stories, and with my background, I’ve always thought it strange that I prefer these classic-type mysteries over police procedurals. Or maybe it’s not strange at all. My dad started work as a State Trooper in the 1950’s, and when I was a small child in the late 1960’s, he transferred to the state Tennessee Bureau of Investigation – something like a Scotland Yard Inspector, Tennessee-style. He covered a number of counties in eastern Tennessee, and had an office in our house. Early on, he would let me read his case files, and I encountered some pretty realistic – and gruesome – things. For example, one of his most lauded cases involved a doctor killed in a shotgun murder, where the victim’s head was blown off. Therefore, when I read about that kind of murder in The Valley of Fear, I didn’t need to imagine how something like that looked – I had seen the photos. My dad sometimes let me go with him on investigations. He taught me how to pull fingerprints, and he was also the law enforcement officer who first made use in a criminal investigation of a young Dr. William Bass, the famed forensic expert known for the Body Farm – located just a few miles from where I’m writing this ever-growing essay – and now the co-author of the Jefferson Bass mysteries. He and my dad were friends, something that my dad was very proud of.

So to wander back to the question: When considering a favorite Holmes story, there is more than just the Canon to pick from. It may be sacrilegious to some, but to me Doyle was simply the first literary agent for Watson, and certainly not the only one. Watson’s notes have been found and edited by countless other people over the years, myself included. The absolute best pasticheur, in my opinion, is consistently Denis O. Smith. Close to him was the late Barrie Roberts, and some others, including June Thompson, Mike Hogan, Gerard Kelly, Tony Reynolds, and Hugh Ashton. Bert Coules’s BBC radio dramas should not be missed. Rick Boyer’s The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a masterpiece, and may be the finest pastiche of them all. Some fan-fiction authors do incredible work, and should not be discounted just because they haven’t appeared in “real” books or magazines. (See my essay in the Baker Street Journal: “In Praise of the Pastiche.”) One of these fan-fiction authors who has made the transition and had some of her works published in book form by Lulu.com is Marcia Wilson (known in the fan-fic world as “Aragonite”.) Her stories tell about things from the perspective of Lestrade, Bradstreet, Gregson, and others on the official side. I’ve told her repeatedly that it’s as if she found Scotland Yard’s tin dispatch box. Highly recommended. (And I’m trying to recruit her to the MX Family….)

But in spite of all the good stories by so many people, I’ll confine my choices for a desert-island story to the Canon. My gut reaction was to blurt out “The Speckled Band,” because it never fails to satisfy. Holmes is brave, and the setting never gets old. Other good ones among so many include “The Red-Headed League” and The Hound of the Baskervilles. But for today, I’m going to go with . . . “The Second Stain.” To me it has so many things, from an opening in the sitting room with a very important visitor and a vital crisis, to Holmes being willing to put the Prime Minister in his place. Watson is able to provide a nudge in the right direction, and Lestrade is in it as well, and the visits to Lucas’s house and then the encounter with Lady Hilda all add up to make it a great story.

Tomorrow I might pick a different one. In fact, I just had some thoughts about “The Six Napoleons,” but I’ll stop for now so that this answer doesn’t get even longer….

The interview will continue in the middle of December. Up next, an interview with author Daniel D. Victor on December 1st followed by a surprise interview on December 4th.

To see the complete works of David Marcum, visit his author page at MX publishing (http://tinyurl.com/nvo2fbs).

Sherlockian Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
Visit Derrick's Amazon Page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...

Daniel D. Victor has returned from his own great hiatus with a masterpiece entitled The Final Page of Baker Street. The novel does a wonderful job of blending the styles of Doyle and Raymond Chandler, who appears as one of the protagonists in the story. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Victor over the last few weeks and started in with why he had been absent for the last twenty years.

1. Your first Sherlock Holmes book was The Seventh Bullet which was published in 1992. What made you decide to write a Sherlock Holmes book then, and why did it take you over twenty years to return to the great detective?

I was nineteen when President Kennedy was assassinated and have been intrigued by political assassinations ever since. Not long after Kennedy's murder, I took a lit class in graduate school that required a paper on a "second-rate" American novelist. In skimming survey book, I saw a footnote reporting that little-known novelist David Graham Phillips had, in fact, been assassinated. That was enough for me. I read some of his political novels, wrote the paper, and eventually turned my research into a full-length doctoral dissertation.

Phillips was actually most famous for a series of articles he wrote in 1906 for William Randolph Hearst. In "The Treason of the Senate," he accused various US Senators by name of "treason" for not representing the American people. Although President Teddy Roosevelt hoped to insult Phillips by calling him "the man with the muckrake" (the first use of the term in American literature), Phillips' articles helped bring about the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution requiring that Senators be elected by direct vote of the people instead of by state legislatures as had previously been the case. In 1911, Phillips was shot to death by a crazed gunman who immediately shot himself. There were wounds from six shots in Phillips, and the suicide added one more. Yet witnesses identified the then-missing gun as a six-shooter. As a result of such confusion, the facts surrounding Phillips' death remained unclear. A seventh-bullet suggested a second gunman. Although I'd contemplated the anomalies in the case for a while, it was only years later, after a student of mine suggested that some of the Senators who'd been the target of Phillips' pen had ultimately killed him, that I started thinking about who could be called upon to set the record straight. Sherlock Holmes immediately came to mind, and in my novel The Seventh Bullet, I sent Phillips' sister to England to appeal to Holmes to come out of retirement, travel to New York, and find out what really happened to her brother--all of which Holmes does.

I can sum up why it took me twenty years to return to Holmes in a single word: family. One of the book-signings I did for The Seventh Bullet took place across the street from a hospital, an important fact because my wife Norma was just about nine-months pregnant at the time St. Martin's published the book in mid-October of 1992. Our first child was born just two weeks later and our second, two years after that. Norma stayed home with each newborn, but as full-time teachers with two small kids to raise, neither one of us had any spare time. If a few free moments did magically materialize for me, napping generally took precedence over writing--although I confess that during the years we were raising our kids, I did manage to compose one novel, a murder-mystery that contained a short story featuring a Holmes-like Edwardian detective named Corliss Simms. A Study in Synchronicity was born out of the challenges I faced getting The Seventh Bullet published. But only after I retired following forty-six years of public-school teaching did I feel confident that I would have the time to research and write another Holmes novel. I turned back to Holmes because the use of his logic allows me to create new ways of looking at historical events. I think it's another way of saying, "Don't believe everything you read." Conveniently, my role as a high-school American lit teacher familiarized me with American writers whom I not only taught about, but who also lived in London at the same time Holmes and Watson did. In "The Final Page of Baker Street," Holmes encounters the young Raymond Chandler. I have future plans that involve Stephen Crane and Mark Twain.

2. For The Final Page of Baker Street, why did you set the real Raymond Chandler in the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes instead of having, say, the fictional Philip Marlowe teaming up with the consulting detective?

I suppose I'm a postmodernist in that I have always been a skeptical reader, one who questions the certainty of what people traditionally call "facts." How do we know what's really true? Are we to believe everything we read in history books? By combining fictional characters with "real" people, I think that I force readers to question what is real and what isn't. I consider it a compliment when someone asks me if a character I created is real or fictional. If I can blur the line in my fiction between what is historical and what is fake, maybe I can blur the line in reality as well. Besides, since it was Chandler and not Philip Marlowe who was a London contemporary of Sherlock Holmes, it only made sense to have Holmes team up with Ray.


3. In your novel, you credit Raymond Chandler as the true author of the story "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone." Should any other stories of Watson's be credited to Chandler?

With its third-person narrator, "The Mazarin Stone" is one of the very few Holmes stories not told by Watson. The obvious question is why? The "true" authorship of the story has, in fact, been debated for years, but thanks to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, the "definitive" explanation soon became clear to me once I discovered the article called "Concerning the Authorship of 'The Mazarin Stone'" (Spring 1959). Combining G.B. Newton's case for Billy the Page's being the "true" author of the story with the fact that Raymond Chandler, who was attending school at nearby Dulwich College, was at just the right age to be a page-boy at Baker Street, I realized that the young Chandler must have been the author of the piece and that the so-called problems with the text could be attributed to the inexperience of the novice writer. (We should also not forget that over the years Conan Doyle gave the same name "Billy" to different page-boys working for Mrs. Hudson.) As my novel suggests, Chandler would have been either too young or too involved with events that were actually occurring in his own life to have had the opportunity to write any other Holmes stories. What's more, Watson would never have stood for it.


4. Chandler's hard boiled fiction is much more violent and sexual than that of Doyle. Where do you most see Doyle's influence over Chandler's work?

Both writers created private detectives although I suppose the distinction is made between Holmes' amateur status and Marlowe's professionalism. Holmes worked from his flat, for instance; Marlowe, from his office. Both writers seemed to have been forever associated with their two detectives, sometimes to the detriment of their creative instincts. But I suppose the greatest influence of Conan Doyle on Chandler was Chandler's decision not to be Conan Doyle. For many years, Chandler, born in Chicago, raised in Ireland and England, struggled to define himself. For a while, it looked as if he was content to be an Englishman, but then he traveled back to America and ultimately began writing stories featuring a "hard-boiled" detective who was not, as Chandler described Sherlock Holmes, "lacking emotional values." Chandler was constantly breaking with tradition; Conan Doyle's detective was a perfect target.

5. The question all Sherlockians hate. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have access to one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?

I prefer the intricacies of novels to the directness of short stories. As a result, I would take The Hound of the Baskervilles with me to that desert island. I like the complexity of the plot, the changes in narration including the manuscript about the Hound and Watson's letters to Holmes, and even the ambiguities that could elicit a literary response called Sherlock Holmes was Wrong by Pierre Bayard. I must also say, however, that I used to love teaching "The Speckled Band." Perhaps the mysterious species that gives the story its name might actually be found on that desert island.

6. You've hinted at this in your answer to my first question. What are your future projects? Can you say more about the trilogy with Mark Twain and Stephen Crane?

In reference to future stories about Holmes in particular, I've been working on three (including the Chandler book) that I've come to regard as a related group. My working title for the trilogy is Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati, and like The Seventh Bullet, my Holmes pastiche from twenty years ago, all deal with American writers who were living in England at the start of the twentieth century. In Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place, the detective meets the daring and persuasive Cora Crane who enlists Holmes' help in finding her husband Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. As happened in reality, Crane has gone missing in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street, Mark Twain reveals what caused him in reality to write "A Double-Barreled Detective Story," in which he ridicules Sherlock Holmes, who actually appears as a character in Twain's piece. My novel's title, incidentally, comes from a letter Mark Twain really wrote in which he told how long it took him to get from his London house to Baker Street. Why he wanted to get there is what the book is about.

I might add that, unrelated to Sherlock Holmes, I am also working on a novel based on my experiences as a high school teacher in Los Angeles where I taught for forty-six years before retiring. In a veiled allusion to T.S. Eliot I've titled the book Cruel September.

For more on Daniel D. Victor, visit his MX page at http://mxpublishing.com/brand/Daniel+....

Sherlockian Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis. Visit Derrick's Amazon Page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...

Today marks the release of my first children's chapter book, The Amazing Airship Adventure: The Macdougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes Book #1. The book involves the brother and sister twin detective team of Emma and Jimmy MacDougall as they work with Sherlock Holmes in trying to stop a mad bomber from destroying London. I am the author of the book, and my brother, Brian Belanger, is the illustrator. Just for fun, Brian decided to turn the tables on me, and I was the one interviewed for this blog. I hope you enjoy seeing me giving the answers instead of asking the questions.

1) Growing up together, you and I always shared a lot of the same interests, especially H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore comics, Ray Harryhausen movies and so on. I don’t remember when you first discovered Arthur Conan Doyle, though --- when did that happen, and which story was the first to grab you?

I had enjoyed Sherlock Holmes stories growing up, but the first one to really grab me was, fittingly, A Study in Scarlet, the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, when I was 14 years old. I chose the book out of a list of choices for an 8th grade mystery unit I was completing in my Language Arts class.

When I started reading the book, for the first half, I was immersed in Doyle’s London, a London as equally magical and breathtaking as that of Dickens. I got introduced to most of the major characters in the canon, and enjoyed the gruesome murder mystery, a story of bloody revenge.

Then suddenly, as the story builds to a climax, the audience runs into a brick wall as the narrative suddenly shifts to the American West in 1847. I had never read a book which was split in two halves that appeared to be two completely different stories. Then, in a brilliant move, the author brings the two stories together in a masterful weaving of plot. I thought Doyle had such faith in his readers, to throw us such a jarring twist and expect us to keep reading to the end. Of course I did, and began gobbling up all of his Holmes stories.

Now before I move onto the next question, I should add that I was hooked on Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories after reading A Study in Scarlet; however, I became hooked on Doyle’s writings a few years later. I was reading a random anthology of literature, the type where the stories are seemingly assembled because of who wrote them, not because of any cohesive theme. Smack in the middle of Shirley Jackson’s “Charles,” and Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Horror of the Heights.” When I read this story, I was stunned at the creativity of the writing, the imagination of the aerial world of beasts living above our heads. I didn’t know Doyle beyond his Sherlock Holmes stories. I was blown away and sought out any and all of his horror writings. This, in many ways, led to my two volume anthology, A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural. I wanted others, especially Sherlockians to know Doyle’s other stories and to see that some equalled his Holmes stories in literary merit and scholarly importance.

2) What made you decide to write specifically for children and young adults? I’m guessing that your daughters had something to do with it…

I’ve always wanted to write for readers of all ages. I wrote a novel a few years ago that was specifically aimed at a young adult audience; however, the book still needs extensive revision and may never see the light of day. Recently, I wrote The Amazing Airship Adventure because my oldest daughter, who is eight, asked me, “Daddy, who is Sherlock Holmes?” I told her about the character and as the conversation continued, we both thought it would be great if there was a child detective working with Sherlock Holmes. Eventually, that idea developed into the MacDougall Twins, ten year old detectives who live across the street from Sherlock Holmes and assist him on adventures. The book was specifically written to introduce children to the Sherlock Holmes characters so that as they get older they will want to seek out the original stories in the canon.

3) Most of the children’s literature I’ve read has the main characters randomly meeting some magical person, or discovering some new world by accident. The MacDougall Twins, on the other hand, deliberately use their wits and skills to solve their mysteries. What made you take this approach?

The audience for The MacDougall twins series is children, and I want my readers to feel empowered from the books. I specifically write the stories so that children can see that they are intelligent and often can see things that adults miss. This is why Holmes relied on the Baker Street Irregulars in the original stories, and why Holmes has great respect for Jimmy and Emma MacDougall. They are great detectives in their own right. To have the twins solve mysteries using magic takes away some of the power from my audience. Kids can’t take out a magic wand and save the world; however, they can save the world using their intelligence and bravery.

4) Will Jimmy and Emma be meeting anyone else from the Holmes stories, such as Irene Adler or Lord Baskerville? Will we see crossovers from Doyle’s other works, such as Professor Challenger?

Yes, they will. The second book of the series, Attack of the Violet Vampire, involves Inspector Lestrade and Toby, the dog who helped Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four. One of the joys of writing the MacDougall Twins is that I’m able to use characters from the canon as well as new characters such as Nolan the newsboy and Jimmy the cab driver, from the MacDougall Twins world. Both types of characters will continue to assist the twins as they solve mysteries. I may also use characters from other Doyle stories or their ancestors, say the grandson of Brigadier Gerard, depending on how the MacDougall mysteries develop.

5) And now, the Question Which You Dread Above All Others: if you were stranded on a deserted island, and could only take one Sherlock Holmes story with you, which one would it be?

Well, this has been called my meanest question, but I’ve had the advantage of asking this question to a number of Sherlockians, so I’ve had time to think this one out. There are so many wonderful and rich stories in the canon, but my overall favorite is “The Man With the Twisted Lip.” The story has that great way of starting with one narrative thread and then shifting into a completely different story. It also shows the sinister underbelly of London with Watson’s descent into the opium den searching for Isa Whitney, and it shows how one can work around the British class system, making a handsome salary as a beggar. To top it all off, you also have Mary Watson calling her husband James instead of John, a great puzzle we Sherlockians love to try to solve.

6) What’s your favorite post-Doyle take on Sherlock Holmes? A Study In Emerald? The Jeremy Brett BBC series? The Great Mouse Detective?

Now, this is a cruel question. There are so many post-Doyle takes on Holmes, there were even quite a number of pastiches written in Doyle’s life time, that I’m not sure if this one is answerable. To me, the greatest actor to play Holme was Jeremy Brett. He is Sherlock Holmes. When I read the stories, I hear his voice, so undoubtedly, Brett is the winner here.

But I’m not stopping there. There have been so many great post-Doyle stories. I’m still new to this world, and I’ve just scratched the surface. Kieran Lyne’s The Last Confession of Sherlock Holmes is probably the best of the bunch I’ve read this year. Geri Schear’s A Biased Judgement is an equally excellent novel. The short stories of David Marcum also stand out as wonderful historical texts as well as fun pastiches. But if I had to choose one piece of writing, I’d go with Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald.” It perfectly blends the worlds of my two favorite authors, Lovecraft and Doyle, and it has one of the best twists I’ve ever read.

This answer could easily change as I delve more and more into the world of Sherlockian pastiches. I have about a half dozen pastiches in my “must read pile,” and that pile is ever expanding.

7) What are your future projects?

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on the second MacDougall Twins book, Attack of the Violet Vampire. I’ve plotted the book, and I’m about halfway through the first draft. I’d like to see the book released in the Spring, but we’ll see how long it takes me to complete the book, plus you’ve got to illustrate it, so we’ll see if we make that goal.

I do have a story coming out in the spring of a non-Sherlockian nature. The book will be included in the anthology, My Peculiar Family, which is a science fiction/ horror collection specifically designed to benefit the podcast show Sci-Fi Saturday Night. My story, entitled "Pieces of Rosalee" falls in the horror category, but I was channeling O. Henry, so mystery readers will have something to enjoy as well.

Beyond those two projects, I have a number of possibilities. I’m speaking at the CCIRA Literacy conference in Denver in February. My session, How to Teach like Sherlock Holmes, is already full. If the talk is well received, I may go in the direction of turning the talk into a teacher’s guide. I’d also like to write a pastiche novel. I’ve got three different ideas wrestling in my mind, and I believe one is starting to beat the others; however, the other two are not down for the count. I’ll continue writing and see where my stories take me. After all, the thrill of writing is discovery.

Sherlockian Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
Visit Derrick's Amazon Page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...

Okay, so not only is this the first time I've interviewed an illustrator, it is also the first time I've interviewed my brother. We've actually been collaborating on and off for over twenty years (anyone remember the comic book?), and now we find ourselves in the realm of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Enjoy the interview and we'll let you determine which of us is Sherlock and which is Mycroft. Hopefully, you don't find either of us to be Moriarty.

1. You are part of a long line of artists who have visually brought Sherlock Holmes to life on the page. How did you go about capturing the look of the great detective for The Amazing Airship Adventure?


I thought, “what do I think of, when I think of what Holmes looks like”? Thin. Wiry. Severe. Professional. Analytical. Suit and tie. You know --- Jeremy Brett! I’d just finished watching the entire run of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, so that version of the character had, and still has, a major influence on my work on The MacDougall Twins. To me, it’s the one series that comes closest to realizing Doyle’s vision of Holmes and his world --- although there are many other fantastic adaptations out there.



I also had fun playing around with the look. I’m not Sydney Paget; my style tends to be very cartoony/caricaturish. So, my Holmes isn’t just thin, he’s impossibly thin. Oversized head --- although that probably comes from The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Dr. Mortimer goes on and on about how he loves the shape of Holmes’ skull. And if his eyes bulge right off of his face, so be it. This series is meant to be fun, and that includes the artwork, too! So there you go – my version looks like Guy Smiley mixed with Jack Skellington. Let the lawsuits begin.


2. You provided the cover illustrations for both volumes of A Study in Terror as well as all of the artwork for The Amazing Airship Adventure. Which piece of artwork was the most difficult for you to create? Which piece is your favorite?


The cover to the first volume of A Study in Terror was probably the most difficult, if only because it was unlike anything I’d ever drawn before. I knew right away that the cover had to reference "The Horror of the Heights." The image of a biplane soaring through the air, as dozens of hungry tendrils pulsed towards it… brrrr! I researched all sorts of images of planes from that time period, and sketched the artwork from the side and overhead views before settling on the finished piece. I also reread my reprints of EC Comics’ Aces High --- a five issue series with amazing artwork by Bernie Krigstein, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, etc; and especially George Evans.



I’m much better at drawing cartoon characters than I am at drawing machinery or buildings, so it’s always a challenge when your scripts call for a particular kind of horse-drawn carriage, or an airship, or a building. I’ll take a curve over a straight line any day! I welcome the challenge, though – it’s the only way to improve!


I recently finished a piece for the first chapter of The Attack of the Violet Vampire, where we see Mr. & Mrs. MacDougall sitting in a carriage. There’s nothing particularly detailed about that shot, but for some reason, it took me twice as long to complete that image as anything else I’ve ever done. Sometimes you’re firing on all cylinders; sometimes you’re just out of gas. Either way, the work still has to be done.


My favorite piece so far is the group shot of the MacDougalls, Holmes, Watson and Mrs. Hudson staring out of the window at an airship flying down Baker Street. I didn’t think that it was important to see the airship; to me, the story was happening in everyone’s reaction to this impossible flying machine. Holmes is the center image; analyzing every detail of the situation while everyone around him is either startled, astonished or outright terrified. I think that image works really well, and I thought it might be good to use as the front cover. Hey, it looks great on the back of the book!


Still… my favorite piece is the one I’ll draw tomorrow. That one’s always my favorite.


3. For A Study in Terror Volume 1, your article was an interview with Christopher Penczak on how there are a growing number of people in the world that have the same or similar spiritual beliefs as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What most surprised you about your findings?


The thing that surprised me the most was that Chris agreed to be interviewed! He’s VERY busy with his writing, his ministry and his public speaking, so I was grateful that he was able to answer my questions.


What I really found surprising wasn’t so much about how spiritualism is still alive and well today – I mean, it’s all over the place. You can buy a Tarot card deck at Barnes & Noble, or a Ouija board at Toys R Us. There are people who don’t believe in any of that, but will still read their horoscopes online everyday, you know? No, it was learning how much Doyle’s beliefs cost him, both personally and professionally. By the end of his life, Doyle had been skewered in the press. An image I kept seeing was an editorial cartoon of Doyle with his head literally in the clouds. That was how people viewed the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His friendship with Harry Houdini suffered… it was very disheartening to read about this. We all want our heroes to have happy endings, but that’s not always the case.



4. Sydney Paget is the best known Sherlock Holmes artist because of his phenomenal work in The Strand. Is there another artist whose depiction of Sherlock Holmes you feel really admire? What makes their depiction stand out?



I always liked the way that Kevin O’Neill drew the great detective in the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel series. Holmes just has a very brief appearance at the Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarity, but everything’s there – the physique, the clothing, the body language. O'Neill also does a great job with Moriarity and later on, with Mycroft Holmes. As a fan of comic book art, I like to wonder about how other artists would have portrayed Holmes. I’d think Eddie Campbell would be absolutely perfect for the job. His work on the graphic novel From Hell sets the standard for capturing Victorian England. Can you imagine a Sherlock Holmes as rendered by Berni Wrightson? Kelley Jones? Shawn McManus? Jae Lee? Dave Sim? Mike Mignola? I really could go on all day like this. Alan Davis and Paul Neary did a great job portraying a team up between a VERY old Sherlock Holmes and Batman…


I have to mention the graphic novel Baker Street: Honour Among Punks by Gary Reed and Guy Davis. It’s an alternate world setting, where Holmes and Watson are young female punks. The story’s a real departure from the canon, but the artwork still captures the spirit of the original Doyle work.


5. You may be an illustrator, but you still get the question. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?


That’s tricky. Part of the appeal of the Sherlock Holmes canon for me are the variety of the stories. When I read these adventures, I don’t just read one story, I’ll read a few in a row. It really gives the sense that you’re reading about someone’s life, and that we’re just getting the highlights as told to us by Watson.


That being said…. Hmmmm….


Okay. Although my favorite story is currently "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (“You see it, Watson?”), I’d have to go with The Hound of the Baskervilles. First and foremost, if I’m stuck on that island, I’m not going to want a short story; I’m going to want a novel. Hound is a great novel – my favorite of the four that Doyle left us. It’s fun; it’s scary; it’s so atmospheric you can feel the chill of the moors seeping into your bones. It’s also a rare chance for Dr. Watson to show off his skills, as Holmes is absent for a good part of the story. This provides a real balance between these two friends and shows that not only is Watson a capable investigator in his own right, but that Holmes and Watson need not be joined at the hip to work together on a case.


I read a description of The Hound of the Baskervilles somewhere that talked about how this was the only mystery novel that even people who hate mystery novels will keep in their libraries. I think it’s a wonderful introduction to the series. You could do worse than having the Hound with you for company on that desert island.

6. What are your upcoming projects?

Currently, I’m illustrating Attack of the Violet Vampire (The MacDougall Twins Mysteries with Sherlock Holmes #2) and having a blast with that. Vampires, gaslight theatres and the return of Nolan the Newsboy --- you’ve gotta love it! Once that’s done, I’ll start on the next MacDougall Twins book, and the one after that, and the one after that… so long as you keep writing ‘em, I’ll keep drawing ‘em! There’s also a book of “monster poetry” I collaborated on a few years ago that I really want to see published in 2015… that’s my top priority, after Violet Vampire’s done, of course. I’ve also been asked to illustrate a sequel to H. G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon as well --- had great fun sketching out the Selenites the way Wells described them. Did you know, even Ray Harryhausen didn’t stick to the original version? I still love his take on them, though --- along with everything else he ever did.

Finally, when I’m between freelance projects and commissions, I’ll contribute new pieces to my site http://www.redbubble.com/people/zhahadun to make into t-shirts, posters, coffee mugs and all sorts of fun stuff.

Of course, I live in New England, so all of that comes after I shovel the driveway.

7. Any final thoughts?

Yes ---
- it’s been bizarre being interviewed by my own brother.
- I like to have old episodes of In Search Of playing in the background while I draw. The combination of Leonard Nimoy’s voice with that eerie seventies background music somehow puts me into creative overdrive.
- I really should be drawing now. Excuse me…

Derrick Belanger is the author of The Amazing Airship Adventure: The Macdougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes Book #1 and editor of the A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural anthology series. Currently both Brian and Derrick are working on the second McDougall Twins book, Attack of the Violet Vampire. You can see more of Brian's artwork at his website: http://www.redbubble.com/people/zhaha... can order our books from Derrick's Amazon page as well: http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange....

For this blog posting, I wrap up my interview with the profoundly knowledgeable Sherlockian David Marcum. Mr. Marcum gives insights his novel, Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt, his Sherlock Holmes in Montague series, and his immense, ever expanding timeline of the world's greatest detective.

1. You published a Holmes novel entitled Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt in 2013. What made you decide to switch gears and go from short stories to a novel format?

Once again, thanks for inviting me back for a second set of the questions, and for telling me that it was okay to ramble some more. When I start thinking about Holmes, one thought obviously leads to another….

As far as switching from short stories to a novel, it was really just to see if I could do something longer. This particular story started as a sliver of an idea from way back, but I didn’t know what to do with it. In 2008, when I was out in the field watching an engineering project get put into the ground, a different kind of place to hide a murdered body occurred to me. As I watched some of these permanent structures being put into place, specifically in this case a sewer pipe, I realized that for the most part, once they went installed they would never be seen again. That idea hung around in my head for years, until finally I was at an all-day seminar, listening to a paint salesman give his dog-and-pony show about how great his product was for coating water tanks. I suddenly got the idea of exactly who the body was that was hidden in the place that I’d thought of years earlier.

At that point, the first volume of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes was just being released by MX, after having been revised from the original edition published a few years before. I was still waiting for Volume II to appear, but I decided to explore writing a novel. I sat down just started to type. As the story opened, it turned out to be a rainy day in Baker Street, and I quickly learned from listening to Watson that this new adventure was beginning the very next day after one of the short stories in Volume I, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle.” Watson was in a rather ill temper, as Holmes had promised him at the end of that other story that they would go to the British Museum today, and instead Holmes was involved in something else at the chemistry table. Since I’d set “Sissinghurst Castle” in the spring of 1888, the novel would therefore be set then as well. I realized that this would be a good chance to explore Watson’s feelings about being back in Baker Street, and where he saw his life going.

When I say back in Baker Street in the spring of 1888, I’m referring to a specific part of William S. Baring-Gould’s chronology: in this case, Watson’s first marriage before Mary Morstan, an idea which I personally buy into. Chronologists have long realized that some of Watson’s personal dates are confusing. He meets Mary Morstan in the fall of 1888 during The Sign of the Four, and he doesn’t marry her until sometime after that. However, several stories that are clearly set before those events refer to Watson’s wife. In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, for instance, which occurs before Sign, Watson says he’s seen little of Holmes since his marriage. Therefore, Watson had a wife before Mary Morstan. Who was she?

Some people simply assume there were only two wives, Mary, and the one in “The Blanched Soldier”, set after the turn of the century, when Holmes states that the good doctor has deserted him for a wife. Others have postulated many wives for Watson, six or more, but I agree with many that believe in the Three-Wife Solution. The second was Mary Morstan, the third was the early 1900’s model, and the first was whoever came before Mary. Baring-Gould solved the problem of this wife’s identity by identifying her as Constance Adams, whom Watson met while traveling in San Francisco a few years earlier. How do we know that Watson was in San Francisco? Because of a play found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers, Angels of Darkness, in which Watson is mentioned as a British doctor living in San Francisco. (While Watson is in the play, Holmes is not.) Confusingly, during the play Watson romances Lucy Ferrier, who is later named as the Mormon Love Hostage in A Study in Scarlet. Certainly, then, Lucy Ferrier isn’t the real name of Watson’s first wife. (Apparently when Doyle was writing the middle section of A Study in Scarlet and Angels of Darkness, he mashed up some names and facts.)

Baring-Gould didn’t get everything right, but he nailed a lot of it, and – always playing The Game, of course – I believe that Baring-Gould had inside information about much of Holmes’s life. Let me explain by going further off-trail for a minute: I greatly enjoy the Holmes novels by Laurie R. King, although I believe that her narrator, Mary Russell is insane, due to her delusional belief that she is married to Holmes. In King’s book The Moor, it is revealed that Baring-Gould’s grandfather, Sabine Baring-Gould, was actually Holmes’s godfather. While some people have criticized William Baring-Gould for supposedly lifting too much of his grandfather’s biography and grafting it onto Holmes’s past, I don’t think that this is the case. Rather, I believe that as the grandson of Holmes’s godfather, William Baring-Gould had access to information that other biographers did not, and that led him to the knowledge that Watson’s first wife was Constance. When Baring-Gould indicated that Constance died suddenly in late 1887, which resulted in Watson’s return to Baker Street soon after, he must have known something that other people didn’t. And this is what I meant, so long ago at an earlier place in this question’s answer, when I referred to Watson returning to Baker Street in early 1888, at the beginning of Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt. One woman wrote me to criticize my ignorance, telling me that Mary was Watson’s first wife, and not Constance. (People have a great sentimental attachment to Mary.) I’m afraid that I had to explain it to her, and I like to think that I made a believer out of her.

2. Your Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street series has been a bit controversial. What led you to revise Arthur Morrison's stories and make them into Sherlock Holmes stories?

Although the initial reaction was controversial, I believe that as the three volumes have appeared, people have gotten more used to the idea. For those who don’t know about this, what I did was to take all the stories featuring the character of Martin Hewitt, as written by Arthur Morrison, and with minimal alterations, change them into Holmes stories. As I state in the introductions to the three books, I personally did not get around to reading the Martin Hewitt stories until I was in my early thirties. I had ignored them for a long time, and what I knew about them was that many people believed that Hewitt was actually a young Mycroft Holmes. Then, after I had completed reading the Hewitt Canon, I was amazed to walk away with the feeling that I hadn’t been reading about Mycroft at all. Instead, the stories seemed to be more about a younger Sherlock Holmes.

It became my theory was that Hewitt’s adventures were actually Holmes’s early investigations while Holmes was living in Montague Street, circa 1876. These adventures were narrated by Brett, Holmes’s journalist neighbor. Later, from 1891-93, when Watson’s stories were taking the world by storm in The Strand, Brett chose to write up his own experiences with the younger Consulting Detective. However, when he tried to publish them, through his own literary agent, Arthur Morrison, he was stopped for some reason, and forced to change Holmes’s name to Hewitt so that publication could proceed.

In September 2013, MX threw a book-signing party for the release of Volume II of The Papers at the Sherlock Holmes Hotel in Baker Street in London. I was there on my incredible Holmes Pilgrimage, and whenever I was back in London during that trip, I stayed at that hotel. Before the signing, I was standing around talking with several MX authors, including Roger Johnson of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. Someone mentioned Hewitt, and it led me to share with Roger and the others my theory that Hewitt was really Holmes. The idea wasn’t ridiculed, and that put the seed in my head to think about editing and publishing all twenty-five of the Hewitt stories as Holmes tales. I had already converted some of them for my own benefit, keeping them in a binder in my collection. When I floated the idea to Roger Johnson, and then Steve Emecz, they were both encouraging, and I finished the conversions.

As I pointed out in the introductions to the books, other people have already been converting old non-Holmes stories into Holmes narratives for quite a while. A man named Alan Lance Andersen edited The Affairs of Sherlock Holmes a few years ago, where different non-series Sax Rohmer stories were reworked as Holmes adventures. Several times over the last year or so, some anonymous editor has begun republishing the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries as e-books on Amazon, retold as Holmes stories. The part that I don’t like about that particular conversion is that the anonymous editor insists on indicating that these new versions are by Arthur Conan Doyle and/or John Hamish Watson, with no mention at all of the fact that R. Austin Freeman actually wrote the original Thorndyke stories. For these Hewitt conversions, I tried to make sure that Morrison got all the credit for these stories.

Some other examples of character-switching include the British ITV series Marple, which has taken non-Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie and converted them into episodes featuring that character. A year or so ago, someone took non-Holmes stories and turned them into BBC radio scripts for a series called The Rivals, wherein different detectives such as Dupin and the Thinking Machine are each aided by Lestrade. And another fellow, (me, actually) took a non-Nero Wolfe Rex Stout story a year or so ago and re-wrote it for the The Gazette (the Nero Wolfe “Wolfe Pack” official journal) as a Nero Wolfe tale – well, actually an Archie Goodwin tale, since Wolfe doesn’t appear in it at all. Several other people have done the same thing with conversions of some of Stout’s other non-Wolfe works over the years.

By changing Hewitt to Holmes, I don’t mean in any way to diminish or take away from Morrison or Martin Hewitt, but I have always read the Hewitt stories as Holmes stories anyway, so I thought that I would enjoy it this way, and maybe other people would as well. I appreciate all of the positive comments and kind reviews that I’ve received related to this project.

3. You have been working on a complete timeline of Sherlock Holmes which includes all of his appearances, even in pastiches. This, in my opinion, is an amazing database of information. How long has this taken you to create, and will we ever get a chance to see it in print?

You’re referring to the fact that I’ve been working on a Complete Holmes Chronology, including both Canon and pastiches, since the mid-1990’s, and even though in the end it’s an impossible task, it’s really changed the way I read about Our Heroes. It also helps to somewhat explain my passion, why I wanted to get to England for so long on a Holmes Pilgrimage, and why it was almost a religious experience for me to actually go last year and visit all of those Holmes-related sites after the way that I’ve lived in that world for so long.

The way this all began is that I started collecting pastiches around the same time that I started reading Holmes, when I was a ten-year-old in the mid-1970’s. I didn’t much care about the difference between what Doyle was presenting and what other people produced, as long as it seemed authentic. I kept buying the pastiches whenever I found them, as I had learned that if you didn’t grab one when it was in front of you, it might be gone forever. I would go to the bookstore with the plan in mind to purchase some book, but if I found an unexpected Holmes volume instead, I jettisoned Plan A and bought the Holmes book.

In the mid-1990’s, I was in my early 30’s and had gone back to school for a second degree in Civil Engineering (since the Federal Agency where I was an investigator actually shut down,) and it was at that school where I really discovered the internet for the first time. This allowed me to track down tons of Holmes fan-fictions, as well as many other Holmes books that I never would have known about otherwise. (It helps that my wife is a reference librarian, who taught me very good research methods. Living in eastern Tennessee, sometimes it takes extra effort to find Holmes-related items.) That was when I really devoted myself to collecting and reading Holmes pastiches on a much more dedicated level. I had been collecting them for years, but I found that I kept re-reading the Canon and the same few favorite pastiches over and over again, and there were a lot that I’d never touched after I bought them and put on the shelves. I finally decided to dive in and read every Holmes story that I had accumulated up to that point.

At the time, I was working some really awful night jobs while going to school during the day, but at least I could do homework there when the work slowed down. I would finish my school work, and then read about Holmes. Soon, I started noticing patterns in stories, and I began to make notes, keeping them, along with relevant British maps, in a small binder that I carried everywhere with me. I was organizing the stories by year, and how they related to the Baring-Gould chronology. (If I repeatedly refer back to Baring-Gould, it’s because I first read his biography of Holmes soon after I started reading the original stories – in fact, before I had even read all of the Canon – so as I’ve mentioned, it was very influential on me. I don’t believe quite everything that he wrote, but I accept a lot of it, such as Watson’s first wife Constance, the relationship with Irene Adler that produced Nero Wolfe as a son, many of the chronological dates, and Holmes and Watson’s death dates in 1957 and 1929, respectively. It makes for a great jumping-off place.) After I finished randomly reading through every traditional Holmes story that I had at the time, I noticed that I had constructed my own rough chronology. I wasn’t finished visiting in that world yet, so I started re-reading again, this time in the chronological order that I had roughly constructed, based upon my notes.

It was amazing for me to see that there was some kind of overall pattern to all the pastiches. I called it the Great Watsonian Oversoul, where pastiche "editors" from many different years all seemed to be tapping into the whole. For instance, (and this is not a literal example, although I often saw things like this), a pastiche written in the 1930's by one author might be about a crime in Edinburgh in a certain month and year. Another pastiche, written in the 1970's by another author, might be set in the same month and year, and refer to recent events in Edinburgh. I'm certain that the second "editor" of Watson’s notes had probably never heard of the first "editor", but somehow he/she unknowingly referenced that early work in passing and the bigger picture was tied together. I have seen many instances of this.

After reading all these pastiches for so long, I can see a Whole Gestalt Holmes, covering the entire lives of Holmes and Watson. For example, I have several hundred stories (including fan-fics, etc.) set before Holmes even gets to Montague Street in the 1870’s. And the number of stories set post-retirement is staggering. I prefer Classic 1880’s most of all, but I’ll take whatever I can get. I’m on my fifth full complete re-read of everything that I have about Holmes in chronological order – that includes novels, short stories, movies, TV and radio episodes, scripts and comics, fan-fics, and whatever else I can find, so it takes a while to do the complete re-read, (especially when one also goes back and fits in new Holmes stuff as it appears or comes up for sale into the chronological years that one has just previously read about), and one also reads many other things, like Game of Thrones, in order to make one’s son happy, and one also has real-life things going on, but luckily if one is a fast reader, but not a skimmer, one can actually retain it all fairly well – and by reading everything I have regarding Holmes in that way, I get a complete and overwhelming sense of the lives of Our Heroes. By the time one starts getting to 1929, when Watson dies, and 1957, when Holmes dies at 103-years (having lived that long thanks to Royal Jelly!) it is actually somewhat emotional. And then I turn around and start again, with a fan-fiction telling how Siger met Violet, (Holmes’s parents) in the 1840’s.

With all the new items constantly appearing and being worked into my rereading, I can’t imagine how long it might take if I ever finish this pass through and start over yet again. My reading is definitely slowing down as I get older – I’m 49 now, and get sleepy too quickly. And there is so much to read. I currently have over 2,000 volumes, many of them pastiches, in my collection. I also have over 100 fat binders filled with fan-fictions, and other items that aren’t available in book form.

I keep reading and re-reading about Holmes over the years, simply because I always like to be in the world of Holmes somehow. I read other books about other completely different characters concurrently, but there is always a Holmes book with me. (For instance, I always bring some Holmes narrative to work and read it during lunch. Today it’s was an amazing fan-fiction novel called A Case of Insanity by an author who writes under the nom-de-plume of Westron Wynde. Right now I’m also reading an Ellery Queen radio play, and Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.) Eventually, as I kept rereading the complete Canon each time, (and not just the very limited original sixty-story Canon,) I began to formalize my Chronology more and more and keep it as a Word document. As I said, I'm now on my fifth re-read of the Canon and every pastiche that I have. I’m currently up through mid-1897 this time, fitting in new stories as I buy or find them, and constructing Version 5.0 of the Chronology.

One has to make a few assumptions with the Chronology. The first is that Holmes was much busier than he and Watson let on in the Canon. It seems that nearly everyone’s pastiche starts with Holmes not having had any work for weeks, lying around whinging and cocaine-ing. In fact, if all these pastiches are to be believed – and I try to believe and work in every traditional one that I can – then Holmes and Watson were involved in a lot of concurrent cases. (This is the theme of my latest book of five stories, hopefully to be published next year: Holmes is in one case when another intrudes, or two take place concurrently, etc.) This idea actually works out when you read the stories. In any given adventure, the only recorded events of a certain day might be a 15-minute conversation taking place during a chapter or two over breakfast or late at night, and that conversation is actually all that is presented for that day. What else happened during that day? Probably some of the events of another pastiche, which Watson separated out when writing so as not to confuse the particular narrative that he is relating.

Part of keeping the Chronology is looking for obvious temporal clues sprinkled throughout the stories, such as mentions of specific dates, seasons, months, days of the week, or even phases of the moon. Sometimes, editors of Watson’s papers are a wee bit careless, saying that a certain specific date is a Monday, when a cursory examination of a Perpetual Calendar reveals that it’s really a Thursday. When they do that, they throw the whole dating of that particular adventure wide open and into question. If that statement is incorrect, how trustworthy are other given chronological facts?


I try to include every legitimate pastiche within the Chronology, unless it is too AU, too supernatural, too offensive (such as making Holmes or Mycroft or Watson or Irene Adler into The Ripper), anything slash, or something that’s just plain awful. Sometimes I have to "bend" the stories a little - or a lot - to make them fit, (as I said I do with the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King – as I’ll explain soon,) by making a note in the Chronology about how this or that is “Incorrect” and doesn't fit with the big picture and the established facts. I excuse these narrative inconsistencies by believing that Watson intentionally obfuscated some things, or was careless, or that maybe even the "editors" of Watson's notes were careless, or possibly had their own agendas that they laid on top of Watson's original rough outlines and notes. For example, author Peter Tremayne, (a pseudonym of Peter Berresford Ellis,) tries to make every person in the Canon Irish. Sherlock and Mycroft? Irish. He states that Mycroft actually works for the Irish Government and not the British Government. Mrs. Hudson? Irish. Sherlock and Mycroft went to University in Ireland. And so on. Tremayne obviously has his own axe to grind about the Irish issue, and when I read his stories I am forced to note that, while the essential matters related to the events are correct, Tremayne has this Irish part “Incorrect”, having grafted his own agenda onto Watson’s original notes.

As mentioned, the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King are excellent, but they take some serious rationalization as well. I’ve always liked the King books, but I don’t believe her assertion that Holmes and Mary Russell were married – with him in his sixties, and she a fifteen-year-old when they met. Several years ago, I emailed Laurie King about my theory that Russell was, in fact, insane, and had imagined the whole marriage to Holmes. Ms. King was politely tolerant, and seemed to be glad that someone was playing The Game with her books. She even put my theory on her website, and her fans, sadly, weren’t so tolerant. Then, I “discovered” a story about Mary Russell’s delusions called “Descent Into Madness”, which is free on-line as a fan-fiction since it involves her copyrighted character. This narrative helps to smooth over that pesky marriage problem, and allows me to enjoy reading the Russell books at their chronologically-appropriate location. Several Sherlockians really liked this story. Roger Johnson of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London wrote in “The District Messenger” that it was a neat solution to the marriage problem. A noted Sherlockian emailed me privately and said that he couldn’t read the Russell books now without thinking of my theory. Another Sherlockian who runs a major Holmes website told me that he’d lost patience with Russell a long time ago and that this was a good use of my time. Here is the link to the story, if anyone would care to read it:

http://www.sherlock-holmes.com/Marcum...

As I said earlier, another assumption with the Chronology that I use is to take most – but not all - of Baring-Gould's chronology as a jumping-off point. This helps nail down a framework to build this thing on. So if a pastiche incorrectly has Watson living in Paddington during the time when he should be in Kensington, I note it in my chronology. Maybe someone compliments Watson on a recent story in The Strand, even though the narrative in which the compliment takes place occurs in the 1880’s, years before The Strand is even in existence. (Many “editors” of Watson’s notes don’t seem to realize that Watson didn’t start publishing in The Strand until 1891, and that after 1893, he didn’t publish there again until 1903.) Perhaps a story indicates that Watson is staying in Baker Street during a time when he is definitely married. Is his wife traveling? Does this story take place at the same time as another story where Watson is staying in Baker Street while he’s married? Maybe these two stories fit together somehow. It might tend to offend some "editors" of Watson’s notes that I have disagreed with them and specific statements in the stories, and that I’ve marked things as “Incorrect” when dating their stories or correcting what doesn’t fit, but after all, a chronology like this is a very subjective thing.

In any case, I have thought over the years that I might try someday to have the Chronology published, although it is always a living work in progress. I have many, and probably all, of the “official” chronologies (Baring-Gould, Bell, Brend, Zeisler, Hall, etc.) that have been published specifically about the stories in the Canon, but the only thing I've ever seen like my pastiche chronology was in the back of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, in which editor Mike Ashley attempted to fit the limited number of pastiches in that particular volume into a larger Canonical chronology.

Another rationalization that occurs when placing various cases in the Chronology involves sorting the different narratives of famous unrecorded cases. For example, there are a lot of pastiches about Huret, the Boulevard Assassin. Why so many? Don’t they contradict one another? I believe that in 1894 Holmes rooted out a whole nest of Hurets. Multiple investigations regarding multiple Hardens, the tobacco millionaires? Holmes helped a lot of tobacco millionaires in that year, and Watson simply changed all their names in his notes to Harden to preserve their anonymity. There were a lot of Giant Sumatran Rats and Red Leeches and Canary Trainers over the years, too.

And Jack the Ripper? I have a few dozen or more Holmes vs. Ripper stories...and I think that almost all of them are true, (as I’ll explain soon….) Holmes-versus-The Ripper may be what prodded me into reading more of the Holmes books in the first place. Not long after I acquired my first Holmes book, but before I read any of it, I saw a piece of A Study in Terror on television, so that was my first experience with Holmes was his encounter with The Ripper. That movie was also what prodded me into going ahead and reading that one Holmes book that I owned, and look where that has taken me.

Not long after that, I read Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, with its identification of the killer as Athelney Jones. I’m not even sure that I had read Sign yet or knew who Jones was, so identifying him as the Ripper wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it might have been. Later, when I saw Murder by Decree in 1979, which was my first complete Holmes film, in a theater with my dad – a great memory – I was confused that yet someone else was being identified as The Ripper. It was one of my first experiences in seeing that there were alternate versions of Holmes’s cases.

Somewhere in that time period – since I wasn’t too discriminating in those days, reading what I could find – I made my way through Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) and realized that people could write things about Holmes that were horribly, sickeningly wrong too.

Over the years, as I constructed my day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour chronology, the most challenging part has been the fall of 1888. When reading all the different and conflicting versions of the Holmes’s encounters with The Ripper, I came to the startling conclusion that any one of these versions isn't more true than the others, but in fact they are all true – well, only Chapters 1-4 of The Last Sherlock Holmes Story are true, as the rest of that one was an abomination and clearly written by Moriarty to besmirch Holmes’s reputation. Each version of Holmes-versus-The Ripper is one of many tiny separated parts of a much bigger overall truth. The fall of 1888 was clearly Holmes's finest hour, with The Hound, Sign, and many other cases all twined around saving England from the massive Ripper conspiracy.

When it was all over, in late November ‘88, Holmes and Mycroft certainly met together at the Diogenes Club and decided that instead of leaving a vacuum of no information – since they couldn’t reveal the real truth – they would control the facts by releasing the whole story in many separate and apparently contradictory pieces, each its own complete and self-contained narrative naming a different Ripper. Some parts of what happened during the massive investigation Watson didn't even know about. For example, in The Mycroft Memoranda, the truth about one of the many Rippers in the conspiracy is even kept from Watson....

After I was fitting everything together about the fall of ‘88, I didn’t want to throw out the Baring-Gould chapter about the Ripper investigation, even though it clearly indicated that Athelney Jones was the Ripper, a solution with which I did not agree. So, in one of the ways that I rationalize these things to include a story in the Chronology, I decided that Athelney Jones didn’t really do it. He knew that in some way the Crown was implicated, so he threw himself on the sword and tried to seem as if he were the Ripper. Later, in a scene not recorded by Baring-Gould, Jones was bawled out for being an idiot and sent back to work, which is why he appears in several post-1888 pastiches. (Apparently, he’s going to be a main character in Anthony Horowitz’s new book Moriarty, being released this fall, and set soon after Reichenbach in 1891. Interestingly, or strangely, he’s described as “Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, a devoted student of Holmes's methods of investigation and deduction.” I don’t know if he’s a devoted student – he certainly wasn’t back in 1888 – but maybe he came around after he was shown some mercy following his Ripper debacle.)

After seeing how complicated the Chronology for the fall of 1888 becomes, with some books broken down literally paragraph by paragraph, it is easy to realize that the Ripper investigation was truly Holmes's finest hour.

So sometimes I think about publishing this “Whole Art of Detection”, but it would be huge, and very subjective, possibly divisive, a formatting nightmare, and as I wrote earlier, “impossible,” because it’s a never-ending project that gets updated daily as I read and add new material. And yet, I wouldn’t trade how much extra enjoyment it’s given me while visiting Holmes’s world.

4. You are one of the most learned and well-read Holmes followers that I know. If you could recommend one must have pastiche that every Holmes fan should read, which would it be? What makes this book stand out?

The possibilities for this question are so overwhelming that I could write another essay, but I’ll actually try and limit my answer. There are so many excellent “editors” of Watson’s notes out there, and I could quickly construct a massive list of not-to-be-missed cases. But after thinking about this for several days, I keep coming back to the same story as an excellent example, an oldie but a goody, “The Adventure of the Deptford Horror” by Adrian Conan Doyle. Even after all these years, I can still feel the mood and atmosphere of this one, and the ending is still terrifying in its quiet way.

I won’t give away too much about it to those who haven’t discovered it yet, but it’s obviously derivative of another famous Canon story. Still, in some ways it is better than that original story.

When I first started collecting Holmes pastiches, I was very fortunate to discover a copy of The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son, and John Dickson Carr. “The Deptford Horror” is one of the stories in the latter half of the book, supposedly written completely by Adrian Conan Doyle after Carr dropped out of the project, either due to ill health, as mentioned in the book’s introduction, or possibly for less pleasant reasons. In any case, the younger Doyle does an incredible job, and I really wish that he’d “edited” more of Watson’s works.

There are so many great pastiche practitioners, both now and in the past, and it’s so hard to pick one out, but for right now this is my answer, and I’ll stick to it. For right now….

5. What are your current projects?

There are several things going on right now. First and foremost, I recently finished “editing” the latest book of Holmes short stories, and plans are that MX will publish it next spring. I just need to give it a final run-through, and then I’ll let my wife have a look at it.

I was very fortunate to be able to contribute two essays to the most recent issue of The Solar Pons Gazette http://www.solarpons.com/Annual_2014_... , and I’ve written a couple of original Pons stories for inclusion in next year’s Gazette as well. Bob Byrne, the editor of the Gazette, is planning a new on-line collection of Pons stories, and I was much honored that he asked me to participate. They are titled “The Adventure of the Doctor’s Box” and “The Adventure of the Distasteful Society”. (As I mentioned in the last interview questions, if you don’t know Solar Pons yet, you should!)

Imagination Theatre just broadcast my second script, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle,” based on a story in my first book. They produced my first script, “The Terrible Tragedy of Lytton House” last year. For those of you who don’t know, Imagination Theater provides an hour of syndicated radio entertainment each week across the country and on the web, in the classic style. They have various rotating series characters, such as Harry Nile, Hilary Caine, and even Raffles the Gentleman Thief, as well as non-series shows classified as “Movies For Your Mind.” But best of all, for Sherlockians they provide incredible stories faithful to the true Canonical Holmes.

I understand that both of these scripts are scheduled to be published in forthcoming issues of a respected Sherlockian journal next year, but I won’t count those chickens quite yet. I’ve been working on the next script for Imagination Theatre. Finally, I’ve submitted a new pastiche to hopefully be included in a major Holmes collection that is being released next year. I’m waiting to hear back and see if I made the cut on that one. If the story isn’t used, I can always use it in a new collection of Holmes stories. I’m already getting the itch to write more of them – I mean “edit” more of Watson’s notes – and the last collection of new stuff hasn’t even been proofed by my wife yet.

6. Any last thoughts?

I’d just like to thank you for the chance to answer these questions, and for you allowing me to take all of this space to follow these Holmesian thoughts down their different rabbit holes. Trying to figure out how to explain in a somewhat linear fashion how much I enjoy the stories – all of the stories! – and also how much I admire the characters of Holmes and Watson has been a lot of fun. It’s really an incredible time to be a Sherlockian, and I’m very proud and lucky to be able to add a little bit to it, in the company of so many great people.

David Marcum welcomes readers to contact him with questions or comments via his e-mail address at thepapersofsherlockholmes@gmail.com. For a complete list of Mr. Marcum's Sherlockian publications through MX, please go to (http://tinyurl.com/nvo2fbs).

Sherlockian Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the historical analysis The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis. Visit Mr. Belanger's Amazon page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...

The influence and appreciation of Sherlock Holmes is a global phenomenon. As evidence, today I have an author interview with Czech writer Petr Macek. Petr, author of Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Cold Served Revenge, writes his novels in Czech and then has them translated to English. A writer of fast paced Sherlock Holmes tales, I interviewed Petr via e-mail:

1. Since you live in Prague, and English is not your first language, what made you decide to write a Sherlock Holmes book in English?

I was introduced to the world of Sherlock Homes as a child. Back in the 80´s, there was a very popular Czech comic from writer Rudolf Čechura and illustrator Marcel Stecker. I absolutely loved it! And it didn´t take too long before I got to the Doyle books. Later, when I started to write, it felt only natural to choose my favourite character and try to create a new story for him. Until today, I published around 15 books in Czech. Two of them are Holmes pastiches, now I´m writing the third one. Holmes is like an old friend I keep coming back to visit from time to time, and it's always a good time - surely for me :) And as I said - I don´t write in English, I write in Czech, so if you read Cold-Served Revenge, it is thanks to the brilliant translation of Andre Swoboda.


2. Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Cold Served Revenge is set in a number of locales in Britain as well as Italy. Your descriptions of your settings are quite vivid. Had you been to the locations you wrote about and did they inspire the story?

I would spend all of my money on traveling, if I could :) So sure, I´ve been to London and some parts of UK several times, as in Venice. I´m letting the World inspire me. I like to put my characters in real places and dealing with real events.


3. Your novel is a Sherlock Holmes book, but it feels like it is influenced by other mystery genres. You have a strong femme fatale character who could fit a gritty Noir film, and your action packed ending could fit the thriller genre. What were your influences, beyond Sherlock Holmes, for your novel?

Some people say that it is easy to use existing characters and put them in some story. They say that half of the work is done. I don´t think its so easy, on the contrary. You have to fit in very specific boards and limitations, set by the original, and yet bring something fresh and new. Truth is, you can never be the second Arthur Conan Doyle, no one can. Fortunately, as you know, Sir Arthur himself gave us permission to bend his mantels, and let us use his Sherlock Holmes character in ways he maybe wouldn´t imagine. I think that´s why Holmes is so alive in 21st century. So yes, my Sherlock is influenced. He is not "an action figure", but he´s got definitely more adventure. He is like I´d want to read a Sherlock Holmes novel if I was a teenager today.



4. You have used Kickstarter campaigns to help fund your book. What is it like using crowd funding? Have you found it a unique way to connect with your fans?

Yes, first of all, I would like to thank all the book supporters! I m very happy we achieved our goal. I used Kickstarter, with a help of my English publisher Mr. Steve Emecz from MX Publishing, to fund the translation of my second Sherlock book - Golem´s Shadow: The Fall of Sherlock Holmes. The Czech edition of the book created a little scandal a few years ago in the Czech Sherlock Holmes Society, so I hope this connection won´t backfire! MX will publish it in March :)


5. The question I ask all Sherlockians. If you were stranded on a desert island with only one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?

The Hound of the Baskervilles. It´s a timeless classic.


6. What are your upcoming projects?

I´m in the middle of work on my third Sherlock Holmes installment. The working title is The Messenger of Death. I must say: God save the Queen! :)

Petr Macek (April 23, 1981) is Czech crime and science fiction writer and journalist. He lives in Prague.
http://www.amazon.com/Petr-Macek/e/B0...


Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the book How to be Like Sherlock Holmes, and the short story collection The Astounding Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction and Horror genres. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...