Mystery
Date Published: 03-01-2023
Publisher: Tekrighter, LLC
Return to the streets and alleys of Victorian London, where the game is afoot once again! The Great Detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and his steadfast companion Dr. Watson are back for ten new cases, spanning the length of the quintessential detective’s illustrious career. Beginning while Holmes was still a green investigator in Montague Street, this collection encompasses the 1880s and the 1890s, up to the dawn of the new century. Walk with Holmes as he puzzles over the problem of a drunken teetotaler, celebrates an old English Christmas at the Red Lion, tracks down the Camberwell poisoner, and experiences the horror in King Street. If you’ve been pining for new traditional, canonical Sherlock Holmes tales, Ten Steps from Baker Street is the collection you’ve been waiting for.
My Writing Career
I want to thank Buffy for graciously giving me the space for this guest post.
My career as an author took two widely disparate roads. The first was my crime fiction series, the Natalie McMasters Mysteries. The other was the pursuit of my lifelong passion for the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes.
No two fictional characters could be more different than Natalie McMasters (aka Nattie) and Sherlock Holmes.
Nattie is a twentysomething, bisexual woman, profane and irreverent, who does not suffer fools gladly, is disrespectful of the common wisdom and quick to spring into action without thinking. She is also courageous and unflinchingly loyal to her family and friends.
Holmes, on the other hand, is a Victorian gentleman; a product of his times with seemingly preternatural detective skills. He is surely eccentric but almost always polite, and while he’s been known to take risks and operate outside the law, his actions are nearly always well considered.
Nattie is my own creation, and it’s been great fun chronicling the course of her chaotic life. She is known for her outrageous decisions, and the Natalie McMasters Mysteries feature complicated plots with many unexpected twists. But these books are not for everyone; Nattie is a flawed character and her books contain scenes of explicit sex and violence, which I think are appropriate to the character as I have envisioned her.
I have recently published a volume of my own Holmes pastiches, entitled Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: Ten Steps from Baker Street. It contains ten new stories, arranged chronologically, beginning with Holmes arrival in London as a green investigator and running to just before his retirement after the turn of the new century.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has accomplished that which many authors aspire to but only a handful achieve―he created a cultural icon. Holmes is still widely popular today; there’s scarcely been a year this decade that a Sherlock Holmes TV show or movie hasn’t been running, and a quick search of Amazon shows 75 pages of books related to Holmes.
I believe that anyone creating new stories about a character of such eminence has a duty, if not to ACD, but to the icon itself, and to the millions of people who have enjoyed and been inspired by his creation. That duty is to remain true to the essence of the characters― to portray Holmes and Watson as gentlemen with a well-defined moral code, Holmes as a consummate thinker, and most of all, a romantic, larger-than-life hero; if he breaks the law, it must always be in service to the greater good, even if the personal consequences may be severe. It’s become trendy to depict Holmes as amoral, a libertine, flighty, or God forbid, even woke, but I can’t abide that. And the whole cocaine thing has been beaten to death.
My stories are strictly canonical, meaning that they conform to the character as portrayed in ACD’s 62 stories and novels and in well-accepted chronologies such as William J. Baring-Gould’s and Leslie Klinger’s. This is not to say that I don’t appreciate well-done, respectful, non-canonical takes on Holmes, such as Anna Elliot’s and Charles Veley’s Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mysteries, or modern derivative works such as the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop Mysteries by Vicki Delaney. Indeed, my favorite cinematic Sherlockian duo is Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, most of whose adventures as Holmes and Watson are set in the 1940s. And August Derleth’s imitation, Solar Pons, has become a star in his own right. I myself have penned a pastiche in which both characters work together.
What is a pastiche? The dictionary says it is a work that imitates the style of a previous work.
What does it take for me to write a successful Holmes pastiche?
The first thing is a mystery to solve. I’ve found no place better to get started than the London newspapers of Holmes’s era. They were the primary source of news and a major form of entertainment, and there were 52 newspaper in London alone in the early 19th century. Many of these can be found online, and the contents never fail to serve as inspiration for new Holmes tales. What if Lestrade brought Holmes in on one of the crimes in the paper? Would it have turned out the same or differently than reported? Articles that do not feature crimes, from the proceedings of Parliament to descriptions of sporting events, can also suggest interesting cases. And then there are Sherlock’s beloved agony columns—personal ads by people seeking anything from love to revenge.
Once I have the crime, my thoughts turn to setting, which is usually, but not always, London. ACD had an easy time of it—he lived there. I have to work at it, though. Luckily, copies of Baedecker’s London and Environs, Baedeckers Great Britain : England, Wales, and Scotland as far as Loch Maree and the Cromarty Firth : Handbook for Travellers, Bradshaw’s Railway Guides, the aforementioned newspapers, and a plethora of websites dedicated to all things Victorian, provide ample information and atmosphere. An invaluable online resource is Charles Booth’s poverty map of London and contemporary police notebooks. Booth was a social reformer who overlaid the detailed ordinance survey maps of London with colors that defined the relative affluence (or lack thereof) of the residents street-by-street, so the modern author can tell rich from poor neighborhoods at a glance. The police notebooks are invaluable as on-the-scene reports of law enforcement activities.
Most of my Holmes stories are set in London, but Ten Steps contains one set in the famous Lakes district and another in the Sussex Downs.
Another facet of the setting is the period in the Great Detective’s career when a case occurs—the canonical Holmes was active from 1881 until World War I. Aspects of London changed greatly over that time. Watson didn’t always live in Baker Street, and Holmes went missing from London between 1891 to 1894 and was presumed dead. All of these things must be considered to depict the setting accurately.
I also like to highlight parts of Victorian culture that my readers may be unfamiliar with. I’ve written stories that feature the courts system, the prisons, club life, and refer to various contemporary artists and performers.
The last requirement for a good Holmes pasticher is an excellent working knowledge of the minutiae of the Canon. Dedicated pastiche readers love new references to the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime or the woman who poisoned her children for their insurance money for example, especially when cast in a light not seen before. And you’d best know where Holmes keeps his tobacco and unanswered correspondence, and who is listed under M in his famous index.
I think that all lovers of the Great Detective will enjoy Ten Steps from Baker Street.
About the Author
Thomas A. Burns, Jr. is the author of the Natalie McMasters Mysteries. He was born and grew up in New Jersey, attended Xavier High School in Manhattan, earned B.S degrees in Zoology and Microbiology at Michigan State University and a M.S. in Microbiology at North Carolina State University. He currently resides in Wendell, North Carolina with his wife and son, four cats and a Cardigan Welsh Corgi. As a kid, Tom started reading mysteries with the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt and Rick Brant, and graduated to the classic stories by authors such as A. Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout, to name a few. Tom has written fiction as a hobby all of his life, starting with Man from U.N.C.L.E. stories in marble-backed copybooks in grade school. He built a career as technical, science and medical writer and editor for nearly thirty years in industry and government. Now that he’s retired to become a full-time a novelist, he’s excited to publish his own mystery series, as well as to contribute stories about his second-most favorite detective to the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories.
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