I'm pleased to say that I'm very close to submitting the manuscript for Tales of the Great Detectives, the third City of the Saved anthology.
Here's the draft blurb:
The Afterlives of Sherlock Holmes
The City of the Saved houses every human being who ever lived. Inevitably, its immortal Citizens entertain themselves by recreating those who never did. One fiction above all has drawn the attentions of the Remakers – a character existing in countless interpretations, many of them now alive and in business together as the Great Detective Agency.
These are their tales.
Read about Holmes and Watson’s sojourn in the strangely clichéd Mansion of Doom, about the Case of the Pipe Dream and the Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate. Learn what happens when a Watson falls in love, when a Moriarty goes missing, and when Sherlock Holmes comes face-to-face with his arch-nemesis, the sinister Dr Conan Doyle...
And here's the lineup of story titles and authors:
Young Sherlock Holmes and the Mansion of Doom – Stephen Marley
Eliminating the Impossible – Jess Faraday
The Case of the Pipe Dream – Chantelle Messier
Art in the Blood – Kelly Hale
The Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate – Andrew Hickey
The Baker Street Dozen – Elizabeth Evershed
I'm absolutely delighted, once again, to have assembled such a talented group of people to write in my shared universe.
Liz Evershed and Kelly Hale will be familiar to readers of Tales of the City and More Tales of the City as the authors of 'The Socratic Problem' and 'The Isis Method' respectively. Kelly in particular has form with the original Great Detective, being the author of the critically acclaimed Erasing Sherlock and a contributor to George Mann's Encounters of Sherlock Holmes.
Stephen Marley's a respected genre novelist, his best-known work being the Chia Black Dragon sequence of novels based on Chinese vampire folklore. His Doctor Who novel Managra was, as I've said elsewhere, a huge inspiration to me in creating the City in the first place, so I'm delighted that he's contributing to its world at last. Like Liz and Kelly, Stephen's written other short stories for Obverse Books in the past.
Jess Faraday is a novelist who's written period detective stories, ghost stories and a steampunk thriller, and is writing for Obverse for the first time. Her Ira Adler sequence juxtaposes Holmesian plotlines with Victorian London's criminalised gay subculture.
Andrew Hickey's a prolific blogger and critic of music, comics and Doctor Who, while Chantelle Messier contributed a brilliantly funny story to The Obverse Book of Detectives. Both also have self-published short fiction to their name, and Andrew at least has another professional commission in the pipeline.
All six have written seriously good stories which transpose Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, their friends, their enemies and their creator, to the City of the Saved. I'm proud to be publishing them all.
Tales of the Great Detectives will be published in Spring 2014 -- more details will follow when I know them.
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(And in case you can't wait until then for a book with my name on the outside and Sherlock Holmes' on the inside, Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, which includes my story 'The Adventure of the Professor's Bequest', is out imminently from Titan Books.)
