It’s all about playing The Game.
That’s the bottom-line reason behind these stories. And what is The Game? For those who don’t know, it’s reading the Sherlock Holmes stories with the firm belief that he and Watson were real historical figures. That Dr. Watson wrote the stories, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was his Literary Agent. That Our Heroes actually lived in Baker Street (for a couple of decades, off and on, and not forever) and solved real cases for real people, even if names and places and dates were changed and obfuscated to protect the innocent, or maybe because Watson’s handwriting was bad, or because of some hidden agenda that the Literary Agent needed to fulfill.
By acknowledging that Holmes and Watson were real, living, breathing, functioning people, then it’s a given that were born, lived, and died. (No magic immortal detectives need apply!) And if they were born and lived and died, then these lives occurred across a fixed period. These men aren’t Time Lords who can be picked up and dropped into other eras, or supernaturally gifted monster hunters in a world where such things exist, and they cannot be remade into a plethora of completely different people to fit whatever agenda some current reader needs to project upon them.
No, the stories in these books are about the same Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson that one finds in the original Canon – those pitifully few sixty stories that were published from 1887 to 1927.
I’ve enjoyed the notion that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was real from nearly the same time that I discovered him – as a boy of ten in 1975. Before I’d even read many of the Canonical adventures, I found two other books that reinforced this idea: William S. Baring-Gould’s biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962), with its chronology of the events in Holmes’s long and amazing life (1854-1957), and also Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), in which Holmes meets historical figures such as Sigmund Freud. How could one read those books, especially at that age, and not be convinced that Holmes was real?
***
In the decades that have passed since then, my interest in Mr. Holmes has only grown. While I read and collect a great many volumes about my other “book friends”, as my son called them when he was small – and there are a great lot of them besides Holmes – I’ve always had a special interest in the consulting detective in Baker Street and his Boswell. Since obtaining my first Holmes book in 1975, I’ve managed to collect and read (and create a massively dense chronology for) literally thousands of traditional Canonical adventures. I’ve worn a deerstalker as my only hat, all year long and everywhere since age nineteen. I’ve been able to make three extensive Holmes Pilgrimages to England and Scotland (so far), wherein I pretty much visited only Holmes-related sites. So it was probably inevitable that, in 2008, I started writing Holmes adventures.
I’d always wanted to write, all the way back to when I was eight years old and intensely reading about The Three Investigators and The Hardy Boys. Not satisfied with just the official publications, I wanted more new stories too. I spent quite a few Saturdays of my young boyhood tapping away on my dad’s typewriter to create new “books”.
As I grew, I dabbled with writing little short pieces, mostly humorous, just intended to make family members laugh, because I loved to write, and it always came easily to me. By the late 1980’s, I was a U.S. Federal Investigator employed by an obscure government agency, often sent away from home for long periods, conducting investigations that lasted anywhere from five weeks to three months. Once, when I was sent to Albuquerque for several months to conduct extensive field investigations, I impulsively stopped at a local Walmart and bought a hundred-dollar typewriter and a big pack of paper with some of my per diem money. (This was the early 1990’s – a long time before personal computers or laptops.)
It was there that I sat down for my first real effort at being a writer – and before I departed I’d finished most of a 600-plus page Ludlumesque novel. (One can get a lot of writing done night after night in a bleak hotel room.) The book was coincidentally about a heroic federal investigator – not unlike myself – who stumbled into a vast Russian-led conspiracy in the American southeast where I’m from. I still have that book – Civil Servants – stored in my old federal investigator briefcase, pushed underneath my bed. Its plot is mired in the early 1990’s when it was written, locked to the aftermath of the Cold War, but it isn’t half bad, and it taught me the valuable lesson that other writers also know: The secret to writing is to put your butt in the chair and do it.
After that particular trip, I went back home, finished up what was left of my epic adventure novel, and then settled back into writing the occasional short piece for our private amusement – but it was inevitable that at some point I would write a Holmes adventure.
In the mid-1990’s, the federal agency where I’d been employed was abruptly eliminated, a victim of the end of the Cold War and a move to reduce the size of government. (After all, the higher-up wise men thought, who needs security now? We won!) Over the next few years, I went back to school and obtained a second degree in Civil Engineering. Then, in 2008 at the start of the Great Recession, I was unexpectedly laid off from my engineering job. With time on my hands, and a desire to try my hand at Sherlockian pastichery, I began writing each morning after the daily job searching was finished.
I ended up with nine of Holmes pastiches, written over several weeks, and then… I did nothing with them. That’s right. Simply satisfied that I’d written them and that they existed, I put them in a binder labeled The Papers of Sherlock Holmes and shelved them with the rest of my Holmes Collection, happy with my secret collector’s item.
But eventually I began to wish for other Sherlockians to see them. I shared one with a Sherlockian friend here and another one there, and the response was very positive. Finally I became bolder and wanted more people to see them, asking myself: Why not put them in a real book of my own?
I communicated about it with a Sherlockian publisher from whom I’d bought books in the past. He immediately offered to publish The Papers, and after a great deal of back-and-forth, my first book eventually appeared. For those who have had that experience – Opening the newly delivered carton to see your book! – there is nothing like it. It’s a satisfaction that cannot easily be described.
That was in 2011. Over the next couple of years, I became aware of MX Publishing. I saw that an acquaintance of mine who’d also had his first book published with the same original publisher as mine had switched to MX, and I reached out to him. He informed me that he was happy to have switched to MX. With that in mind, I sent an email to Steve Emecz, Sherlockian Publisher Extraordinaire – and that was truly life-changing and improving decision.
In 2013, Steve republished my first book, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, and he made the whole experience so painless that I set about writing a Holmes novel, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt. That same fall, I was making my long-planned first Holmes Pilgrimage to London, and Steve arranged for me to have a book-signing in The Sherlock Holmes Hotel in Baker Street, where I was staying (when not traveling about to Dartmoor, the Sussex Coast, Edinburgh, and other locations). I was able to meet Steve for the first time on that trip, and found him to be one of the nicest, most supportive, and most thoughtful people around – and that hasn’t changed a bit.
Jump ahead a little bit: In early 2015, I woke up early from a dream in which I’d edited a Holmes anthology. Instead of rolling over and forgetting the idea, I arose and started thinking about authors whom I admired and that I might want to invite to write stories. I ran the idea by Steve, and he was willing to publish it, so I began sending invitations. I hoped that I might get a dozen stories (at best) for a modest paperback volume. Fearing a lack of response, I kept sending invitations to everyone that I could think of – and then, amazingly, people started signing up. New Sherlock Holmes stories started to arrive in my email in-box – which quickly becomes addictive. More and more authors heard about it – some that I didn’t even know about yet – and before we knew it, the little idea had grown into a three-volume hardcover behemoth of over 60 new Holmes stories – Parts I, II, and III of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, the largest collection of its kind ever produced to that point.
Early on, Steve and I had decided that the royalties from the project would go to support the Stepping Stones School for special needs children, located at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes. The books were a smashing success and received a lot of attention, and I was able to go to London in the fall of 2015 for the release party – what turned out to be Holmes Pilgrimage No. 2. There I was able to meet a number of the contributing authors in person – and to my everlasting regret, I was so thrilled that I barely remembered to take any photos!
After I returned home, I began to receive more emails, now asking when the next book was planned – Good grief! A next book?!? – and also stating that many authors (both returning and new) wanted to contribute.
I’d had no plans to do any more books, thinking that the first three were lightning in a bottle that couldn’t be recaptured… but then I realized that the heavy-lifting in terms of decision-making and set-up and formatting and process-building had already occurred, so Steve and I decided to keep going. (I think I said to him “Let’s do one more… .”)
Part IV came out in the spring of 2016 – and after that, more people kept sending stories for the next books and wanting to join the party. We came up with the plan to have yearly books. But we received so many stories that it grew to twice a year. We now have an un-themed spring collection – the yearly Annual – and also a fall collection with a specific theme, such as Christmas adventures, seemingly impossible crimes, Untold Cases, etc. As more and more stories kept rolling in, it became necessary for each season’s particular set to grow to multiple simultaneously published volumes. That’s how, in just a few short years, we’re now up to Parts XXVIII, XXIX, and XXX (to be published in Fall 2021), and as I write this, I’m already receiving stories for the Spring 2022 Annual, Part XXXI (and XXXII and XXXIII too… ?)
So far the books have raised over $85,000 for the school, and it’s my hope and expectation that they’ll go over $100,000 within the next few months of writing this foreword.
***
As part of editing these books, I couldn’t let them pass by without adding my own stories – editor’s prerogative. Thus, that helped to motivate me to sit my butt in the chair and write more about Mr. Holmes. By way of these books, I’ve met some really incredible people, including the incomparable Belanger Brothers, Derrick and Brian. Derrick initially contributed short stories, while Brian – a truly gifted artist – became the MX cover artist after the original artist passed away.
At one point, the two Belangers wrote a series of Holmes books for children. Eventually they formed Belanger Books – another amazing Sherlockian publishing venture. Between MX and Belanger Books – both of which cooperate beautifully with one another – the Sherlockian publishing field is amazingly well covered, providing an opportunity for so many people to be Sherlockian pasticheurs when they would otherwise be excluded by those who happily and aggressively seek to squash that aspect of the Sherlockian experience.
In 2016, the Belangers asked me to assemble and edit a Holmes story collection for them. I did, and as it also consisted of traditional and Canonical adventures, and had many of the same authors as in the MX anthologies, I formatted it the same way. After that, I edited another one for them, and another, and those also grew to simultaneously published multiple volumes. This extra editing also served to motivate me to write more Holmes stories for each of those collections as well – because I didn’t want those trains leaving without me being on them.
From there, I began to receive invitations to write still more stories for other editors’ anthologies and magazines. Along the way I published a couple more of my own books – Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins (2015) and Sherlock Holmes and The Eye of Heka (2021) – but most of my stories that I wrote over those years remained uncollected within the various anthologies and magazines in which they had originally appeared. All along, I stayed too busy with real life and family and my dream job (as a civil engineer working for my home town’s public works department), along with writing more stories and editing various books, to take the time to properly collect them all into my own books.
But within the last few months, I looked up and saw that (as of right now) I’ve now written 86 Holmes pastiches, (along with 20 pastiches about Solar Pons, “The Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street” – but that’s another story and another hero.) Thus, the idea of this collection was born.
These initial five books of The Complete Papers contain 77 of those 86 stories. The others are still in the pipeline to be published elsewhere. Right now (as of mid-September 2021), I also have five more Holmes stories promised to be written for various editors before the end of the year, and all of these, plus whatever I’m able to write in 2022 – with a plan to reach Pastiche No. 100 – will be published in Volume VI of this set in later 2022… Fingers crossed!
***
Many people have sports figures or musicians or actors or (curiously) politicians as heroes. My heroes have always been my book friends and authors – all the way back to when I was eight or nine and wondering about why I couldn’t track down satisfying biographical information concerning the brilliant and prolific and mysterious author Franklin W. Dixon. I’ve always admired writers for what they accomplish and create while spending great chunks of their lives self-imposed isolation – something which I now understand. And at least if I had to set aside all that time to put my butt in the chair, I’ve been very fortunate that all of these stories almost told themselves. I almost never outline or plan. Instead, when I write – when I find that it’s time for another story – I simply open a blank Word document on the computer and then wait for Watson to begin whispering to me. It’s scary, but I trust the process now, and when it works – and it always has so far – there’s no feeling quite like it.
Through these stories, I’ve achieved two important personal goals: In my own small way, I’ve become a writer, and I’ve also added to The Great Holmes Tapestry, a phrase I coined several years ago to describe the massive collection of narratives about the true Holmes and Watson – novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics and fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts – that tell the complete and entire course of their lives from beginning to end. The Canon serves as the supporting structure – the wire core of the rope, the heavy steel girders of the skyscraper – but the thousands of traditional post-Canonical pastiches provide essential depth and color, filling in all the spaces around The Canon, and adding important information about The Whole Lives of Our Heroes.
I’ve long described myself as a missionary for The Church of the Traditional Canonical Holmes, preaching that the bigger picture of both Canon and the traditional pastiches should be seen and supported. This means giving respect and value to additional Holmes adventures, and not just those original sixty because they were the ones that came across the first Literary Agent’s desk.
Ross MacDonald – (Real Name: Kenneth Millar, another of my authorial heroes because of his incredible private eye, Lew Archer) – said “It’s all one case.” In other words, a Great Tapestry. He meant that even though he’d written eighteen Archer novels and a number of short stories from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, they were never meant to stand alone. They were all part of one overall arching story – Lew Archer’s story – spanning across multiple narratives.
It’s the same with the Holmes adventures – all of them, Canon and traditional pastiche, mine and everyone else’s. They fit together to tell the entire story of Sherlock Holmes, and with the stories in this collection, I’m incredibly proud to have added my own contribution.
***
“Of course, I could only stammer out my thanks.”
– The unhappy John Hector McFarlane, “The Norwood Builder”
At some point during the foreword-writing for the various MX anthologies, I began to use the quote shown above from Mr. McFarlane in regard to Thank You’s. It’s fitting – I can only stammer out thanks, and never adequately express how grateful I am for all the help and encouragement I’ve received over the years in all aspects of my life – not just the writing and editing of Sherlock Holmes stories.
First and foremost, I am always overwhelmed at how incredibly fortunate I am to have my wife and son in my life. In all aspects, my wife – of 33 years as I write this – is the kindest and wisest and most beautiful person inside and out I know, and she has been there throughout with complete support and encouragement when we went through such things as some terrible jobs and the grind of my returning to school. We have pushed through together, and anything that I can ever accomplish I owe to her. And equally amazing is our son, so incredibly funny and smart, and truly an amazing person in every way. I enjoy every minute spent with him, and it only gets better. I love you both, and you are everything to me!
Then there are my parents and sister, who put up with me during those first couple of decades – I probably don’t even realize how bad that was for them. My parents did everything to encourage me – music lessons leading to a piano scholarship in college, all the books that I could read, and generally anything to help me grow as a person, so that it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted. And my sister was my best friend then, patiently listening as I rambled about whatever interested me. Even then, she probably heard more about Sherlock Holmes than she’d ever bargained for!
There is a group that exchanges emails with me when we have the time – and time is a valuable commodity for all of us these days! As the years have gone by, we’ve gotten busier and busier, and I don’t get to write as often as I’d like, but I really enjoy catching up whenever we get the chance. These people are all wonderful writers, and I recommend them highly as both friends and authors: Mark Mower, Denis Smith, Tom Turley, Dan Victor, and Marcia Wilson.
***
Next, I wish to send several huge Thank You’s to the following:
***
The re-publication of my first book with MX was an amazing life-changing event for me, leading to writing many more stories and then editing books, along with unexpected Holmes Pilgrimages to England. By way of that first email with Steve, I’ve had the chance to make some incredible Sherlockian friends and play in the Holmesian Sandbox in ways that I’d never before dreamed possible.
Through all of it, Steve has been one of the most positive and supportive people that I’ve ever known. He works far more than a full-time week at his day job, and he still finds time to take care of all aspects of MX Publishing, with the help of his wife Sharon Emecz, and cousin, Timi Emecz. (That’s right – MX is just the three of them who get all of this done!)
Many who just buy books and have a vague idea of how the publishing industry works now might not realize that MX, a non-profit which supports several important charities, consists of simply these three people. Between them, they take care of running the entire business, including the production, marketing, and shipping – all in their precious spare time, in and around their real lives.
With incredible hard work, they have made MX into a world-wide Sherlockian publishing phenomenon, providing opportunities for authors who would never have them otherwise. There are some like me who return more than once to Watson’s Tin Dispatch Box, and there are others who only find one or two stories there – but they get the chance to publish their books, and then they can point with pride at this accomplishment, and how they too have added to The Great Holmes Tapestry.
From the beginning, Steve has let me explore various Sherlockian projects and open up my own personal possibilities in ways that otherwise would have never happened. Thank you, Steve, for every opportunity!
Over the last few years, my amazement at Brian Belanger’s ever-increasing talent has only grown. I initially became acquainted with him when he took over the duties of creating the covers for MX Books following the untimely death of their previous graphic artist. I found Brian to be a great collaborator, very easy-going and stress-free in his approach and willingness to work with authors, and wonderfully creative too. His skills became most apparent to me when he created the cover for my 2017 book, The Papers of Solar Pons, which was one of the most striking covers that I’ve ever seen. Later, when the Belangers and I began reissuing the original Pons books in new editions, and then new Pons anthologies, Brian’s similarly themed covers continued to astound me. He truly deserves an award for these.
In the meantime, he has become busier and busier, continuing to provide covers for MX Books, and now for Belanger Books as well, along with editing and occasionally writing.
I finally met both Brian and Derrick in person in early (pre-pandemic) 2020 at the annual Sherlock Holmes Birthday Celebration in New York City, and they’re just as great in person as they were by way of email. I immediately felt like I’d known them both forever. I cannot express to either one of you just how grateful I am.
Later, in 2015 on Holmes Pilgrimage No. 2, they invited me to stay with them for several days in their home, and that was one of the best parts of all the trips. They gave me tours, they showed me their incredible collection, they let me see life in a real British household and not just from a hotel room, and we had some wonderful conversations along the way. I was able to see them again in 2016, Holmes Pilgrimage No. 3, when we attended the Grand Opening of the Stepping Stones School at Undershaw.
I’m more grateful than I can say that I know Roger. His Sherlockian knowledge is exceptional, as is the work that he does to further the cause of The Master. But even more than that, both Roger and his wonderful wife, Jean, are simply the finest and best, and I’m very lucky to know both of them – even though I don’t get to see them nearly as often as I’d like, and especially in these crazy days! In so many ways, Roger, I can’t thank you enough, and I can’t imagine these books without you.
After those first two books, Nick went on to have a very successful career in film. (More about that in a minute.) But he has continued to dip in an out of Sherlockian pastichery with The Canary Trainer (1993), The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (2019), and The Return of the Pharaoh (2021). He is a Sherlockian legend, and it’s an indisputable fact that the publication in 1974 of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution – a pastiche, mind you! – was the beginning of the Sherlockian Golden Age when has grown and grown, and has never stopped, all the way to today.
If it was just that, Sherlockians – and especially pasticheurs – would owe him an unpayable debt. But then there’s Star Trek, which he also saved. As mentioned above, I have lots of interests besides Mr. Holmes, although he does demand more and more attention as my years pass. But I’ve been a Trekkie (or Trekker, or whatever the correct term is) since I was a wee lad in the late 1960’s, when my babysitter happened to watch one of the original prime-time episodes. After that, I grew up seeing the original series in re-reruns, and then I was among those who saw the first Star Trek film in 1979 (and truthfully felt mightily disappointed. I do like it better now.) But it was Nick Meyer’s Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982) which electrified the Trek Universe, jump-starting it into motion in a way that – like the Holmes Golden Age – has only grown. And how it’s grown! Hundreds and hundreds of Star Trek novels and comic books, multiple films and television shows, with more in planning and production all the time, and fan interest around the world at an all-time high. As a nearly life-long Star Trek fan, who loves it nearly as much as The World of Sherlock Holmes, I credit the origin of this original escalation entirely to Nick Meyer.
I generally despise social media, but it’s a very useful way for Sherlockians to connect. Imagine my thrill when I began to see occasional online posts from Nick Meyer – and when I dared to respond, sometimes he would respond back! I’ve learned that if you don’t ask, you’ll never know, so I connected with him a bit more often, and eventually I boldly asked him to write a foreword to one of the MX anthologies that I edit, and he most-generously agreed. After that, we’ve stayed in touch off-and-on, and that still never ceases to amaze me.
I met him in person at the 2011 From Gillette to Brett conference in Bloominton, Indiana, where he was the featured guest. I took my Holmes book, asked him to autograph them, and asked – like everyone does – when he’d write his next Holmes book. He certainly doesn’t remember that, but he was the main reason I chose to attend that event.
One of my greatest regrets is that, while attending the 2020 Sherlock Holmes Birthday Celebration in New York, I was almost able to meet him in person again – and this time he’d know who I was – but I didn’t get to speak with him, and it was my own fault. We had emailed ahead of time, planning to meet, and that day I entered the famed dealer’s room and saw him seated at a table near the door, surrounded by many fans. I wandered away, intending to return in a just a very few minutes and dive into the crowd, hoping that it might have thinned a bit. But when I got back over there, he’d already left! Hopefully I’ll get another chance, sooner rather than later, where I can thank him in person for so many things…
…including generously writing a foreword for these volumes. When I was considering who could write a foreword, I couldn’t think of anyone more fitting. Through Nicholas Meyer I found pastiches, which have been so important to me over the years. Nick, thanks from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to be part of these books!
And finally, last but certainly not least, thanks to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Author, doctor, adventurer, and the Founder of the Sherlockian Feast. Honored, and present in spirit.
***
As I always note when putting together an anthology of Holmes stories, the effort has been a labor of love. This time the labor and love have been mine. These adventures are more tiny threads woven into the ongoing Great Holmes Tapestry, continuing to grow and grow, for there can never be enough stories about the man whom Watson described as “the best and wisest… whom I have ever known.”
David Marcum
September 8th, 2021
A most important day,
for all kinds of reasons
Questions, comments, or story submissions may be addressed to David Marcum at
thepapersofsherlockholmes@gmail.com