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 Maclntyre – 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 energies to Sherlock Holmes, and I'm delighted he did.
Amy Myers, "The Adventure of the Faithful Retainer". Amy Myers is best known for her books featuring the master-chef with the remarkable deductive powers, Auguste Didier who first appeared in Murder in Pug's Parlour in 1987 and has built up a dedicated following. The stories are contemporary with Sherlock Holmes and there is little doubt that the two would have been acquainted
Barrie Roberts, "The Mystery of the Addleton Curse". Roberts (b. 1939) is a criminal lawyer who lives in the West Midlands but was born and raised in Hampshire. He is a criminal lawyer, although he has also worked as a journalist, computer programmer and lecturer, most recently lecturing on ghosts and unsolved mysteries. He is a tireless Sherlockian having developed his own chronology of the cases into which he has woven three novels to date, Sherlock Holmes and the Railway Maniac, Sherlock Holmes and the Devil's Grail and Sherlock Holmes and the Man from Hell.
Barbara Roden, " The Adventure of the Suspect Servant". Barbara Roden (b. 1963) is a Canadian enthusiast of the ghost and mystery story who helped found the first Canadian Holmes society west of the Rocky Mountains, the Stormy Petrels of British Columbia, in 1987. With her husband, Christopher Roden, she is joint organizer of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society. They also operate the specialist ghost-story press Ash-Tree Press and the Calabash Press devoted to books about Sherlock Holmes. "The Adventure of the Suspect Servant" won
a pastiche contest sponsored by the Bootmakers of Toronto in 1989 but is published here in a slightly revised form for the first time.
Denis O. Smith, " The Adventure of the Silver Buckle". Smith (b. 1948) is a dedicated Sherlockian scholar who has produced a number of Holmesian pastiches starting with The Adventure of the Purple Hand, issued from his own Diogenes Publications. All are listed in Appendix II and have been reissued by Calabash Press with a new story as The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. He also has a passion for old maps and Victorian railways, both of which are germane to Holmes's adventures. Although a Yorkshireman by birth he now lives in Norfolk with his wife and three daughters.
Guy N. Smith, "The Case of the Sporting Squire". Smith (b. 1939) was both a bank clerk and a gamekeeper before he settled down to full-time writing in 1975. He is probably still best remembered for his early gruesome horror novels such as The Sucking Pit, The Slime Beast and the best-selling Night of the Crabs, and though most of his sixty or more books are horror fiction, he has produced other material including westerns and, rather surprisingly, film novelizations of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty and Song of the South, as well as books for children under the alias Jonathan Guy. He began his writing career selling mystery and horror short stories to the London Mystery Magazine and has long been a devotee of Sherlock Holmes.
PeterTremayne, "The Affray at the Kildare Street Club". Peter Tremayne (b. 1943) is the pseudonym of Celtic scholar and historian Peter Berresford Ellis who, under his own name, has written many books tracing the history and myth of the Celts, including The Celtic Empire, Celt and Saxon and Celt and Greek. In the fiction field he established an early reputation for his books of horror and fantasy, particularly his Dracula series collected in the omnibus Dracula Lives!, and his Lan-Kern series based on Cornish mythology, which began with The Fires of Lan-Kern. He is now, perhaps, best known for his series of historical mysteries featuring the seventh-century Irish Advocate, Sister Fidelma, in
the books Absolution by Murder, Shroud for an Archbishop, Suffer Little Children, The Subtle Serpent and The Spider's Web.
RobertWeinberg, "The Adventure of the Parisian Gentleman" with Lois H. Gresh. Weinberg (b. 1946) is an American bookdealer, collector and author who has written a number of novels of fantastic fiction. He has produced several featuring occult detective Alex Werner, starting with The Devil's Auction, plus a sequence of humorous fantasy novels which began with A Logical Magician.
DerekWilson, "The Bothersome Business of the Dutch Nativity". DerekWilson has written over thirty books of history, biography and fiction, including the acclaimed family biographies, Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power and The Astors 17631922: Landscape with Millionaires. He also also written two fascinating books on the circumnavigation of the globe, The World Encompassed – Drake's Voyage 1577-1580 and The Circumnavigators. In the world of mystery fiction he has created the character of Tim Lacy, international art connoisseur and investigator whose cases have been chronicled in The Triarchs, The Dresden Text and The Hellfire Papers.