34 new traditional Holmes adventures in two simultaneously published volumes

Part XII: 1894-1902 features contributions from: C.H. Dye, David Marcum, Thomas Fortenberry, Daniel D. Victor, Nik Morton, Craig Janacek, S. Subramanian, Jim French, Robert Stapleton, Nick Cardillo, Paul D. Gilbert, Mike Hogan, Derrick Belanger, John Linwood Grant, Mark Mower, Jane Rubino, and Arthur Hall, and a poem by “Anon.”

Buying Link: viewbook.at/MXHolmesStoriesPartXII

The Stories

• The Shanghaied Surgeon   –  C.H. Dye
• The Trusted Advisor – David Marcum
• A Shame Harder Than Death – Thomas Fortenberry
• The Adventure of the Smith-Mortimer Succession – Daniel D. Victor
• A Repulsive Story and a Terrible Death –  Nik Morton
• The Adventure of the Dishonourable Discharge –  Craig Janacek
• The Adventure of the Admirable Patriot  – S. Subramanian
• The Abernetty Transactions – Jim French
• Dr. Agar and the Dinosaur – Robert Stapleton
• The Giant Rat of Sumatra –  Nick Cardillo
• The Adventure of the Black Plague  – Paul D. Gilbert
• Vigor, the Hammersmith Wonder –  Mike Hogan
• A Correspondence Concerning Mr. James Phillimore  –  Derrick Belanger
• The Curious Case of the Two Coptic Patriarchs –  John Linwood Grant
• The Conk-Singleton Forgery Case   –  Mark Mower
• Another Case of Identity  –  Jane Rubino
• The Adventure of the Exalted Victim  –  Arthur Hall

The Contributors

Anon.” is a devoted Sherlockian and player of The Game.

Brian Belanger is a publisher and editor, but is best known for his freelance illustration and cover design work. His distinctive style can be seen on several MX Publishing covers, including Silent Meridian by Elizabeth Crowen, Sherlock Holmes and the Menacing Melbournian by Allan Mitchell, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt by David Marcum, Welcome to Undershaw by Luke Benjamen Kuhns, and many more. Brian is the co-founder of Belanger Books LLC, where he illustrates the popular MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes young reader series (#1 bestsellers on Amazon.com UK). A prolific creator, he also designs t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and other merchandise on his personal art site at http://www.redbubble.com/people/zhahadun.

Derrick Belanger (who also has a story in Volume III) is an educator and also the author of the #1 bestselling book in its category, Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Peculiar Provenance, which was in the top 200 bestselling books on Amazon. He also is the author of The MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes books, and he edited the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle horror anthology A Study in Terror: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Revolutionary Stories of Fear and the Supernatural. Mr. Belanger co-owns the publishing company Belanger Books, which released the Sherlock Holmes anthologies Beyond Watson, Holmes Away From Home: Adventures from the Great Hiatus Volumes 1 and 2, Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street, and Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of H.G. Wells Volumes I and2. Derrick resides in Colorado and continues compiling unpublished works by Dr. John H. Watson.

Nick Cardillo has loved Sherlock Holmes ever since he was first introduced to the detective in The Great Illustrated Classics edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at the age of six. His devotion to the Baker Street detective duo has only increased over the years, and Nick is thrilled to be taking these proper steps into the Sherlock Holmes Community. His first published story, “The Adventure of the Traveling Corpse”, appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VI: 2017 Annual, and his “The Haunting of Hamilton Gardens” was published in PART VIII – Eliminate the Impossible: 1892-1905. A devout fan of The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Hammer Horror, and Doctor Who, Nick co-writes the Sherlockian blog, Back on Baker Street, which analyses over seventy years of Sherlock Holmes film and culture. He is a student at Susquehanna University.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) Holmes Chronicler Emeritus. If not for him, this anthology would not exist. Author, physician, patriot, sportsman, spiritualist, husband and father, and advocate for the oppressed. He is remembered and honored for the purposes of this collection by being the man who introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Through fifty-six Holmes short stories, four novels, and additional Apocryphal entries, Doyle revolutionized mystery stories and also greatly influenced and improved police forensic methods and techniques for the betterment of all. Steel True Blade Straight.

C.H. Dye first discovered Sherlock Holmes when she was eleven, in a collection that ended at the Reichenbach Falls. It was another six months before she discovered The Hound of the Baskervilles, and two weeks after that before a librarian handed her The Return. She has loved the stories ever since. She has written fan-fiction, and her first published pastiche, “The Tale of the Forty Thieves”, was included in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part I: 1881-1889. Her story “A Christmas Goose” was in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part V: Christmas Adventures, and “The Mysterious Mourner” in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VIII – Eliminate the Impossible: 1892-1905

Steve Emecz’s main field is technology, in which he has been working for about twenty years. Following multiple senior roles at Xerox, where he grew their European eCommerce from $6m to $200m, Steve joined platform provider Venda, and moved across to Powa in 2010. Today, Steve is CCO at collectAI in Hamburg, a German fintech company using Artificial Intelligence to help companies with their debt collection. Steve is a regular trade show speaker on the subject of eCommerce, and his tech career has taken him to more than fifty countries – so he’s no stranger to planes and airports. He wrote two novels (one a bestseller) in the 1990’s, and a screenplay in 2001. Shortly after, he set up MX Publishing, specialising in NLP books. In 2008, MX published its first Sherlock Holmes book, and MX has gone on to become the largest specialist Holmes publisher in the world. MX is a social enterprise and supports two main causes. The first is Happy Life, a children’s rescue project in Nairobi, Kenya, where he and his wife, Sharon, spend every Christmas at the rescue centre in Kasarani. In 2014, they wrote a short book about the project, The Happy Life Story. The second is the Stepping Stones School, of which Steve is a patron. Stepping Stones is located at Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former home.

Lyndsay Faye BSI, ASH is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, including the Sherlockian volumes Dust and Shadow, about Sherlock Holmes’s attempt to hunt down Jack the Ripper, and The Whole Art of Detection, containing fifteen Holmes adventures. Additionally, she has written The Gods of Gotham, which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel, Seven for a Secret, The Fatal Flame, Jane Steele, and the forthcoming The Paragon Hotel. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense that she was born elsewhere, lives in New York city with her husband, Gabriel.

Thomas Fortenberry is an American author, editor, and reviewer. Founder of Mind Fire Press and a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, he has also judged many literary contests, including the Georgia Author of the Year Awards and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. His Sherlock Holmes stories have appeared in An Improbable Truth, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VIII: Eliminate the Impossible (1892-1905), and the forthcoming MX collection Some Untold Cases.

James R. “Jim” French became a morning Disc Jockey on KIRO (AM) in Seattle in 1959. He later founded Imagination Theatre, a syndicated program that broadcast to over one-hundred-and-twenty stations in the U.S. and Canada, and also on the XM Satellite Radio system all over North America. Actors in French’s dramas included John Patrick Lowrie, Larry Albert, Patty Duke, Russell Johnson, Tom Smothers, Keenan Wynn, Roddy MacDowall, Ruta Lee, John Astin, Cynthia Lauren Tewes, and Richard Sanders. Mr. French stated, “To me, the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson always seemed to be figures Doyle created as a challenge to lesser writers. He gave us two interesting characters – different from each other in their histories, talents, and experience, but complimentary as a team – who have been applied to a variety of situations and plots far beyond the times and places in The Canon. In the hands of different writers, Holmes and Watson have lent their identities to different times, ages, and even genders. But I wanted to break no new ground. I feel Sir Arthur provided us with enough references to locations, landmarks, and the social conditions of his time, to give a pretty large canvas on which to paint our own images and actions to animate Holmes and Watson.” Mr. French passed away at the age of eight-nine on December 20th, 2017, the day that his contribution to this book was being edited. He shall be missed.

Mark A. Gagen BSI is co-founder of Wessex Press, sponsor of the popular From Gillette to Brett conferences, and publisher of The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library and many other fine Sherlockian titles. A life-long Holmes enthusiast, he is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars and The Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis. A graphic artist by profession, his work is often seen on the covers of The Baker Street Journal and various BSI books.

Paul D. Gilbert was born in 1954 and has lived in and around Lindon all of his life. He has been married to Jackie for thirty-nine years, and she is a Holmes expert who keeps him on the straight and narrow! He has two sons, one of whom now lives in Spain. His interests include literature, ancient history, all religions, most sports, and movies. He is currently employed full-time as a funeral director. His books so far include The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes (2007), The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (2008), Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra (2010), The Annals of Sherlock Holmes (2012), and Sherlock Holmes and the Unholy Trinity (2015). He has finished Sherlock Holmes: The Four Handed Game, to be published 2017, and is now working on his next novel.

Melissa Granger, Executive Head Teacher of Stepping Stones School, is driven by a passion to open the doors to learners with complex and layered special needs that just make society feel two steps too far away. Based on the Surrey/Hampshire border in England, her time is spent between relocating a great school into the prestigious home of Conan Doyle, and her two children, dogs, and horses, so there never a dull moment.

John Linwood Grant is a writer and editor who lives in Yorkshire with a pack of lurchers and a beard. He may also have a family. He focuses particularly on dark Victorian and Edwardian fiction, such as his recent novella A Study in Grey, which also features Holmes. Current projects include his Tales of the Last Edwardian series, about psychic and psychiatric mysteries, and curating a collection of new stories based on the darker side of the British Empire. He has been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, with stories range from madness in early Virginia to questions about the monsters we ourselves might be. He is also co-editor of Occult Detective Quarterly. His website greydogtales.com explores weird fiction, especially period ones, weird art, and even weirder lurchers.

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893) was born in Leeds, England. His amazing paintings, usually featuring twilight or night scenes illuminated by gas-lamps or moonlight, are easily recognizable, and are often used on the covers of books about The Great Detective to set the mood, as shadowy figures move in the distance through misty mysterious settings and over rain-slicked streets.

Arthur Hall was born in Aston, Birmingham, UK, in 1944. He discovered his interest in writing during his schooldays, along with a love of fictional adventure and suspense. His first novel, Sole Contact, was an espionage story about an ultra-secret government department known as “Sector Three”, and was followed, to date, by three sequels. Other works include four Sherlock Holmes novels, The Demon of the Dusk, The One Hundred Percent Society, The Secret Assassin, and The Phantom Killer, as well as a collection of short stories, and a modern detective novel. He lives in the West Midlands, United Kingdom.

Mike Hogan (with a story in Part XI as well!) writes mostly historical novels and short stories, many set in Victorian London and featuring Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. He read the Conan Doyle stories at school with great enjoyment, but hadn’t thought much about Sherlock Holmes until, having missed the Granada/Jeremy Brett TV series when it was originally shown in the eighties, he came across a box set of videos in a street market and was hooked on Holmes again. He started writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches several years ago, having great fun re-imagining situations for the Conan Doyle characters to act in. The relationship between Holmes and Watson fascinates him as one of the great literary friendships. (He’s also a huge admirer of Patrick O’Brian’s AubreyMaturin novels). Like Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin, Holmes and Watson are an odd couple, differing in almost every facet of their characters, but sharing a common sense of decency and a common humanity. Living with Sherlock Holmes can’t have been easy, and Mike enjoys adding a stronger vein of “pawky humour” into the Conan Doyle mix, even letting Watson have the second-to-last word on occasions. His books include Sherlock Holmes and the Scottish Question, the forthcoming The Gory Season – Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Murders and the Sherlock Holmes & Young Winston 1887 Trilogy (The Deadwood Stage; The Jubilee Plot; and The Giant Moles), He has also written the following short story collections: Sherlock Holmes: Murder at the Savoy and Other Stories, Sherlock Holmes: The Skull of Kohada Koheiji and Other Stories, and Sherlock Holmes: Murder on the Brighton Line and Other Stories. http://www.mikehoganbooks.com

In the year 1998 Craig Janacek took his degree of Doctor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University, and proceeded to Stanford to go through the training prescribed for pediatricians in practice. Having completed his studies there, he was duly attached to the University of California, San Francisco as Associate Professor. The author of over seventy medical monographs upon a variety of obscure lesions, his travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of his fictional works. To date, these have been published solely in electronic format, including two non-Holmes novels (The Oxford Deception and The Anger of Achilles Peterson), the trio of holiday adventures collected as The Midwinter Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, the Holmes story collections The First of Criminals, The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes,The Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, and the Watsonian novels The Isle of Devils and The Gate of Gold. Craig Janacek is a nom de plume.

Roger Johnson BSI, ASH is a retired librarian, now working as a volunteer assistant at the Essex Police Museum. In his spare time, he is commissioning editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, an occasional lecturer, and a frequent contributor to The Writings About the Writings. His sole work of Holmesian pastiche was published in 1997 in Mike Ashley’s anthology The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and he has the greatest respect for the many authors who have contributed new tales to the present mighty trilogy. Like his wife, Jean Upton, he is a member of both The Baker Street Irregulars and The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. .

David Marcum (who also has a story in Volume II) plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975, at the age of ten, when he received an abridged version of The Adventures during a trade. Since that time, David has collected literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes Vol.’s I and II (2011, 2013), Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt (2013, 2016), Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins (2015, 2017), and The Papers of Solar Pons (2017). Additionally, he is the editor of the three-volume set Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street (2014, recasting Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt stories as early Holmes adventures,), the two-volume collection of Great Hiatus stories, Holmes Away From Home (2016), Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street (2017), Imagination Theatre’s Sherlock Holmes (2017), the authorized eight-volume reissues of the Solar Pons stories, the three-volume set of Canonical Sequels Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Beyond the Canon, and a number of forthcoming volumes including a Solar Anthology and the complete Dr. Thorndyke adventures. Additionally, he is the creator and editor of the ongoing collection, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015-   ), now at twelve volumes, with another in preparation as of this writing. He has contributed stories, essays, and scripts to The Baker Street Journal, The Strand Magazine, The Watsonian, Beyond Watson, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, About Sixty, About Being a Sherlockian, The Solar Pons Gazette, Imagination Theater, The Proceedings of the Pondicherry Lodge, and The Gazette, the journal of the Nero Wolfe Wolfe Pack. He began his adult work life as a Federal Investigator for an obscure U.S. Government agency, before the organization was eliminated. He returned to school for a second degree, and is now a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. He is a member of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, The Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problem (The Engineer’s Thumb”), The Occupants of the Full House, The Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C., The Tankerville Club (all Scions of The Baker Street Irregulars), The Sherlock Holmes Society of India (as a Patron), The John H. Watson Society (“Marker”), The Praed Street Irregulars (“The Obrisset Snuff Box”), The Solar Pons Society of London, and The Diogenes Club West (East Tennessee Annex), a curious and unofficial Scion of one. Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat from autumn to spring. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

Nik Morton hails from the northeast of England and has lived in Spain with his linguistmusician wife Jennifer for the last fifteen years. He served in the Royal Navy for twentythree years and has been writing for fifty-three years. He sold his first story in 1971 and has had 120 short stories published – some winning awards – in several genres such as action, adventure, romance, ghost, horror, sci-fi, western and crime. To date, six collections of his short stories have been collected and published, the latest being Leon Cazador, P.I. His Sherlock Holmes pastiche ‘The Very First Detective: The Killing Stone’ is published in the October 2018 issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine. He has edited periodicals and contributed hundreds of articles, book and film reviews to magazines. He has chaired several writers’ circles and run writing and screenplay workshops, and judged competitions. He has edited many books, and for the period 2003 -2007 he was sub-editor of the monthly colour magazine, Portsmouth Post, and for 20112013 he was Editor-in-Chief of a U.S. publisher but stepped down to spend more time on his various writing projects. Since 2007, he’s had thirty books published, among them the psychic spy series: Mission: Prague, Mission: Tehran, and Mission: Khyber, a modern vampire thriller set in Malta, Chill of the Shadow, a Sister Rose thriller, The Bread of Tears, and a romantic thriller set in Tenerife, An Evil Trade. His latest books are a sci-fi time-travel adventure, Continuity Girl, a noir western/homage to Edgar Allan Poe, Coffin for Cash, and the third in a fantasy series (co-written under the pen-name Morton Faulkner), Floreskand: Madurava. His guide Write a Western in 30 Days – with Plenty of Bullet Points is a best-seller and has reviewers recommending it for writers of all genres, not just westerns. To learn more about Nik follow him on twitter https://twitter.com/nik_morton or read his regular blog posts, http://nikwritealot.blogspot.com.

Mark Mower is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and The Solar Pons Society of London. He writes true crime stories and fictional mysteries. His first two volumes of Holmes pastiches were entitled A Farewell to Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes: The Baker Street Case-Files (both with MX Publishing) and, to date, he has contributed chapters to six parts of the ongoing The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. He has also had stories in two anthologies by Belanger Books: Holmes Away From Home: Adventures from the Great Hiatus – Volume II – 1893-1894 (2016) and Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street (2017). More are bound to follow. Mark’s non-fiction works include Bloody British History: Norwich (The History Press, 2014), Suffolk Murders (The History Press, 2011) and Zeppelin Over Suffolk (Pen & Sword Books, 2008).

Sidney Paget (1860-1908), a few of whose illustrations are used within this anthology, was born in London, and like his two older brothers, became a famed illustrator and painter. He completed over three-hundred-and-fifty drawings for the Sherlock Holmes stories that were first published in The Strand magazine, defining Holmes’s image forever after in the public mind.

Jane Rubino is the author of A Jersey Shore mystery series, featuring a Jane Austenloving amateur sleuth and a Sherlock Holmes-quoting detective; Knight Errant, Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, (a novel-length adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, co-authored with her daughter Caitlen Rubino-Bradway, What Would Austen Do?, also co-authored with her daughter, a short story in the anthology Jane Austen Made Me Do It, The Rucastles’ Pawn, The Copper Beeches from Violet Turner’s POV, and, of course, there’s the Sherlockian novel in the drawer – who doesn’t have one? Jane lives on a barrier island at the New Jersey shore.

Robert V. Stapleton was born and brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, and studied at Durham University. After working in various parts of the country as an Anglican parish priest, he is now retired and lives with his wife in North Yorkshire. As a member of his local writing group, he now has time to develop his other life as a writer of adventure stories. He has recently had a number of short stories published, and he is hoping to have a couple of completed novels published at some time in the future.

S. Subramanian is a retired professor of Economics from Chennai, India. Apart from a small book titled Economic Offences: A Compendium of Crimes in Prose and Verse (Oxford University Press Delhi, 2012), his Holmes pastiches are the only serious things he has written. His other work runs largely to whimsical stuff on fuzzy logic and social measurement, on which he writes with much precision and little understanding, being an economist. He is otherwise mainly harmless, as his wife and daughter might concede with a little persuasion.

Daniel D. Victor, a Ph.D. in American literature, is a retired high school English teacher who taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for forty-six years. His doctoral dissertation on little-known American author, David Graham Phillips, led to the creation of Victor’s first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Seventh Bullet, in which Holmes investigates Phillips’ actual murder. Victor’s second novel, A Study in Synchronicity, is a two-stranded murder mystery, which features a Sherlock Holmes-like private eye. He currently writes the ongoing series Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati. Each novel introduces Holmes to a different American author who actually passed through London at the turn of the century. In The Final Page of Baker Street, Holmes meets Raymond Chandler; in The Baron of Brede Place, Stephen Crane; in Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street, Mark Twain; and in The Outrage at the Diogenes Club, Jack London. His most recent novel is Sherlock Holmes and the Shadows of St. Petersburg. Victor, who is also writing a novel about his early years as a teacher, lives with his wife in Los Angeles, California. They have two adult sons.