The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [301]
Edward D. Hoch, “Vittoria, the Circus Belle“. Edward Hoch (b. 1930) is a phenomenally prolific American short-story writer with over seven hundred to his credit. He has created many fascinating detectives, including Captain Leopold, Dr Sam Hawthorne, Nick Velvet, Ben Snow and Simon Ark. His stories appear regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine but only a few have made it into individual story collections. Well worth tracking down is his Captain Leopold volume, Leopold’s Way, his Simon Ark series, The Judges of Hades, City of Brass and The Quests of Simon Ark, the Nick Velvet books The Spy and the Thief and The Thefts of Nick Velvet, whilst a few of his Sam Hawthorne stories have been collected as Diagnosis: Impossible. His more general mystery fiction will be found in The Night My Friend. Hoch has written several Sherlock Holmes stories including “The Return of the Speckled Band” in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Manor House Case” in Resurrected Holmes and “The Christmas Client” in Holmes for the Holidays.
Roger Johnson, “The Adventure of the Grace Chalice“. Johnson (b. 1947) is a noted Sherlock Holmes afficianado and writer of ghost stories. It was through Sherlock Holmes that Roger met his wife, Jean. He was the founder of the Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society and writes regularly on matters Sherlockian. A small private press produced his first collection of ghost stories, Deep Things Out of Darkness in 1987, and a more extensive volume, A Ghostly Crew, is under production.
H.R.F. Keating, “The Adventure of the Suffering Ruler“. Keating (b. 1926) is the renowned author of the novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID, which began with The Perfect Murder in 1964 and is still going strong. He was won many awards and has compiled the invaluable reference works of the crime and mystery fiction field Whodunit?, Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime and Crime Writers: Reflections on Crime Fiction. He has also written Sherlock Holmes: the Man and His World and two Holmes pastiches, this story and “A Trifling Affair”.
David Langford, “The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech“. Langford (b. 1953) is a popular writer of science fiction, not averse to the occasional spoof. His first book-length work, An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871, issued under the alias of William Robert Loosley fooled many people into believing it was a genuine Victorian account of a close encounter with aliens. His science-fiction novels include The Space Eater and Earthdoom! (with John Grant) plus the clever satire on the scientific establishment The Leaky Establishment, drawn from Langford’s own direct experiences.
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, “The Enigma of the Warwickshire Vortex“. F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre – Froggy to his friends – is a Scottish-born, Australian-raised, American-resident author who is a fund of knowledge on a wide range of esoterica, as his story reveals. He is the author of the excellent Victorian science-fiction novel The Woman Between the Worlds, as well as several pseudonymous novels and many stories for the science-fiction magazines.
Michael Moorcock, “The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger“. Moorcock (b. 1939) scarcely needs an introduction. He was one of the prime movers in the reshaping of science fiction in the mid-sixties, with his editorship of New Worlds and his Jerry Cornelius series of stories, and is one of the most popular writers of heroic fantasy with his many series featuring the various incarnations of the Eternal Champion, the most famous being Elric of Melniboné. Moorcock has long been fascinated with the end of the Victorian era and a number of books, most notably the Oswald Bastable series, sought to recreate an alternate Victorian world, whilst his Dancers at the End of Time sequence, also reflected that fin-de-siècle mood. It was clearly only a matter of time before Moorcock turned his creative