For its upcoming Christmas special, Sherlock will be traveling back to the time period in which it was written, and fans can get their first glimpse in the delightfully tongue-in-cheek teaser that was recently released. Watch the clip below, and enjoy everything we've come to love from this series: a sarcastic Sherlock, a blunt Watson,…
The Dead Assassin by Vaughn Entwhistle is the 2nd book in the Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle where the author sets out to solve an ill-fated assassination (available June 9, 2015). I am a great fan of Barbara Hambly’s James Asher novels, urban fantasies of Victorian vampires that place the protagonist—a former spy—right in the…
From Robert Downey Jr.’s period, pulp-action hero to Benedict Cumberbatch’s autism-spectrum, modern genius to Hugh Laurie’s narcissistic Dr. House to Vincent D’Onofrio’s troubled Detective Robert Goren, we’ve seen nearly every conceivable iteration of the Great Detective. What may surprise you, however, is that the first serious, novel-length Holmes pastiche would also later start the killer…
In this most devoutly-to-be-wished encounter between two of fiction’s greatest detectives, the role of Miss Jane Marple is elaborated by Ashley Weaver, that of Mr. Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye. This is the first of a group of posts commemorating the 70th anniversary of Mystery Writers of America, an organization whose members have contributed this exclusive…
Join Rhys Bowen and Tasha Alexander as they discuss their favorite (and least) crime televison series, casting decisions, and ponder the perfect actors to play their own leading characters! Rhys Bowen: Tasha, do you watch many mysteries/crime shows on TV? I am not a huge TV viewer and I find that most of the shows…
Before Benedict and Basil, there was William Gillette, a US-born actor who suited up on stage as Sherlock Holmes over 1,000 times, including once in a silent film. But until very recently, the 1916 film was believed to be lost, erasing the bridge that took Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian-era detective and catapulted him into the…
As the Baker Street Irregulars prepare for Sherlock Holmes’ birthday, celebrated this year beginning January 7th, here’s a less-known version of a Sherlock Holmes short story, which begins in marital horror and ends with The Great Detective nose-tweaked by one of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries, Mark Twain. The setting is the Virginia countryside, circa 1880. An…
The theater world has long been a prime setting for mystery and mayhem. Shakespeare, that homicidal scribe, virtually carpeted the stage with slain corpses. The murderers he created are numerous: Richard III, Othello, Titus Andronicus, Lear’s daughter Goneril, Macbeth (both He and She) and a whole squad of Caesar-skewering assassins—whose best-known member, Brutus, made this…
Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, edited by David Thomas Moore, is a Holmesian anthology of short stories that takes the famous sleuth through time and space (available October 7, 2014). This new anthology contains fourteen stories rather than two hundred and twenty-one, but it provides more than enough variety for Holmesians. Following in the…
Having recently finished The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers’ golden age whodunit, I had a small epiphany during the re-shelving process. I realized that I have quite a lot of numerically titled mysteries in my collection. Well, friends, my epiphany is your epiphany. For no reason other than whimsy (not to be confused with Lord…
