Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(119)

HALLIE EPHRON is the daughter of Hollywood screenwriters, so her first encounters with the Sherlock Holmes Canon were through movies. It was only natural that she set “Understudy in Scarlet” on a movie set. Hallie is a New York Times bestselling author of suspense novels. Her latest, Night Night, Sleep Tight, received a starred PW review: “Old Hollywood glamour, scandals, and lies infuse this captivating thriller.” Her books have been finalists for Edgar?, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards, and her Never Tell a Lie was made into a Lifetime Movie Network movie. She is an award-winning book reviewer for the Boston Globe. http://hallieephron.com MEG GARDINER grew up watching Basil Rathbone play Sherlock Holmes. But she only came to appreciate the great detective after moving from California to London and reading The Hound of the Baskervilles when her children were assigned it in elementary school. The kids had to grab the book from her hands. She’s been a Holmes fan ever since. Meg is the author of twelve thrillers that have been bestsellers in the U.S. and internationally and have been translated into more than twenty languages. China Lake won the 2009 Edgar? Award for Best Paperback Original. The Dirty Secrets Club was chosen one of the Top Ten Thrillers of 2008 by Amazon. The Nightmare Thief won the 2012 Audie Award for Thriller/Suspense Audiobook of the Year. Her current novel, Phantom Instinct, was chosen one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s “Best Books of Summer.” She lives in Austin, Texas. www.meggardiner.com LAURIE R. KING is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes stories, beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (one of the IMBA’s 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century). She has won or been nominated for an alphabet of prizes from Agatha to Wolfe, been Guest of Honor at several crime conventions, and is probably the only writer to have received both an Edgar? Award and an honorary doctorate in theology. She was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2010, as “The Red Circle.” www.LaurieRKing.com LESLIE S. KLINGER is the New York Times bestselling editor of the Edgar?-winning The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and the multi-award-winning ten-volume Sherlock Holmes Reference Library. He also co-edited, with Laurie R. King, the anthologies A Study in Sherlock and the Anthony-winning In the Company of Sherlock Holmes. He became hooked on the Sherlock Holmes Canon while he was attending law school, desperate for some non-law reading. He freely admits that even more than the stories, the footnotes of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould were his primary interest. He also writes about other geeky subjects, such as Dracula, H. P. Lovecraft, and Frankenstein and has edited two anthologies of horror stories. Klinger was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars in 1999 as “The Abbey Grange.” www.lesliesklinger.com Probably like many of his generation, WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER came to Sherlock Holmes via Hollywood. Those atmospheric black and white gems cranked out in the thirties and forties guided him to the classic original texts and he was, of course, hooked on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Nevertheless, for him, Basil Rathbone will always be the image of that greatest of detectives and the bumbling, mumbling Nigel Bruce will always be Watson. Krueger writes the New York Times bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series, which is set in Minnesota’s great Northwoods. His novel Ordinary Grace received the Edgar? Award for Best Novel in 2014.

As a child, TONY LEE was a reluctant reader and therefore never read any of the Sherlock Holmes novels, only ever reading of Holmes’s exploits in a special issue of DC comics Batman. That was until he saw Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes on TV in 1984. Following this, he devoured every one of Holmes’s adventures, in the process discovering a joy for reading that he has never lost. Now a #1 New York Times bestselling writer of comics, books, TV, and film, Tony has written for the world of Sherlock Holmes in both audio (The Confessions of Dorian Gray: Ghosts of Christmas Past) and comic form (his series of Baker Street Irregulars Graphic Novels were so popular, they were even made into a US stage play), but hopes more than anything to write something one day that redeems the poor, misunderstood and maligned Professor Moriarty. He can be found at www/tonylee.co.uk.

JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times bestselling novelist, five-time Bram Stoker Award? winner, and comic book writer. He has been a longtime fan of Sherlock Holmes and wrote a Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Greenbrier Ghost,” which is based on the only case in American legal history where the testimony of a ghost was introduced in court and led to the conviction of a murderer. Jonathan has also performed in regional theater in several one-act dramatizations of Holmes stories, playing Mycroft Holmes, James Moriarty, and Charles Augustus Milverton. He writes the Joe Ledger thrillers, the Rot & Ruin series, the Nightsiders series, the Dead of Night series, as well as standalone novels in multiple genres. His comic book works include, among others, Captain America, Bad Blood, Rot & Ruin, V-Wars, and others. He is the editor of many anthologies, including The X-Files, Scary Out There, Out of Tune, and V-Wars. His books Extinction Machine and V-Wars are in development for TV, and Rot & Ruin is in development as a series of feature films. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse, and the co-founder of The Liars Club. Prior to becoming a full-time novelist, Jonathan spent twenty-five years as a magazine feature writer, martial arts instructor, and playwright. www.jonathanmaberry.com Growing up in Edinburgh, CATRIONA MCPHERSON had Holmes, Watson, Conan Doyle, Deacon Brodie, Burke, Hare, Jekyll, and Hyde hopelessly muddled until she read her way to clarity in her teens. When she started writing her own fiction she was drawn back into their world, not so much for the gaslight and cobblestones as for the secrets and the shame. Edinburgh, rigidly respectable on the surface, is a great place for secret shame. She has written ten novels in a historical series set in Scotland, featuring private detective Dandy Gilver, which The Guardian calls “quietly subversive.” They have won Agatha, Macavity and Bruce Alexander awards and been shortlisted for a CWA dagger. Recently, she began a strand of contemporary standalones and has won two Anthony awards for these as well as being an Edgar? finalist for The Day She Died. Her latest is The Child Garden. You can find her at www.catrionamcpherson.com.