I was nine, at my grandparents’ house in Doerun, Georgia. The two girls next door were visiting their grandparents. I’d read the books I’d brought. I had nothing to do. Help. My mother told me to look in the bookcase in the hall, a room as big as some houses today. Against the wall stood a bookcase with, I discovered, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I started reading them, took some home and read more on subsequent visits until I was steeped in the stories of the dread, the ratiocinators, the world’s first detectives, Chevalier Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes.
Years passed. One day I picked up a used copy of Barring Gould’s annotated Sherlock Holmes stories. I plunked down $5 and took it home. As I reread the familiar stories, a character showed up, a London street dog who insisted his name was Digby. I wrote his story and Claudia Mills, a fellow children’s book author told me about Derrick and Brian Belanger who were starting up an American publisher. (Derrick’s wife had been her student and she had just stayed with them to do school talks.) She gave me Derrick’s address and the saga began when he published Scones and Bones on Baker Street: Sherlock’s (maybe!) Dog and the Dirt Dilemma
A year later The Rascal in the Castle: Sherlock’s (possible) Dog and the Queen’s Revenge followed.
One day Derrick asked me if I would like to contribute to an anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Me write as Dr. Watson a story about the world’s first consulting detective, a character who had become so real people have been writing to him at 221B Baker Street for more than a hundred years? I’d had twenty-two children’s books published and a number of literary stories. Could I do this? I decided to try and to date I have written fifteen stories as Dr. Watson and I plan to write many more. I love dipping into that atmospheric historical world as Dr. Watson and concocting other adventures of ratiocination and derring-do!
Brenda Seabrooke, March 2022