About the Author

“Holmes is such a silver streak of light. He’s a magnesium flame on a tightrope.”

—Jeremy Brett.

Remarkable Power of Stimulus is Gretchen Altabef’s second novel with MX Publishing and is the sequel to These Scattered Houses. The third volume of this 1894 trilogy is presently in the works.

Ms. Altabef met Sherlock Holmes for the first time in Ronald Howard’s portrayal of the great detective when she was six. His Holmes was young, friendly, gifted, of a philosophic, scholarly bent, and genuinely human. The Sherlock Holmes of A Study in Scarlet. She read Conan Doyle concurrently with Poe as contraband in high school.

Of an adventurous bent she became the first woman in local TV news to race through perilous New York City streets to get to the scene of the crime. As the best video images were taken before the police and fire companies arrived. She was also the first woman hired by the District Attorney’s Office to chronicle crime scenes. Here she gained a true sense of the science and of the horror of Sherlock Holmes.

Ms. Altabef’s fictional journeys are strongly influenced by her copious historical research. Plus the application of that imagination and intuition Holmes usually found lacking in the Scotland Yarders. As an author of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, she includes the history that women were creating in Victorian and Edwardian times.

A member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, the John H. Watson Society, and the artist collective, the Dumpster Divers of Philadelphia. She spends much of her time catching up at the Baker Street fire.