Story Profile: “The Adventure of the Specious Spouse”

Story Profile: “The Adventure of the Specious Spouse”

 

In Belanger Books’ latest collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories, Stranger Than Truth, Holmes solves a bunch of cases connected to real-life figures from his time period such as Theodore Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum, Nellie Bly, the Elephant Man Joseph Merrick, Annie Oakley, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, and many more.  

 

As you may have guessed, I have a story in the collection, where Holmes solves a case alongside the real-life lawyer and activist Grace Quackenbos Humiston, one of the first female lawyers in New York City.  Over the course of her careers, she defended the downtrodden, uncovered cases of forced servitude, and solved a mysterious disappearance.  These adventures earned her the nickname “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.”

 

If you’re interested in learning more about the fascinating career of Grace Quackenbos Humiston, please check out Brad Ricca’s book Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.

 

In my story, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson visit New York, only for Holmes to become increasingly annoyed by people who mistakenly believe he’s married to Grace Quackenbos Humiston.  When she comes to Holmes for help clearing the name of one of her clients, it leads into an investigation into the seedy underbelly of the city.

 

Sherlock Holmes: Stranger Than Truth is available now. 

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^thfrom MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

How I Discovered Joyce Porter

How I Discovered Joyce Porter

 

We discover our favorite authors in many different ways.  Sometimes we’re given books as gifts– that’s how I discovered Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Sometimes we do research for authors we hope we’ll like.  That’s how I discovered G.K. Chesterton.  And sometimes we stumble upon authors by accident.  That’s how I met Joyce Porter.

 

I’m a big fan of radio drama.  It’s been decades since it was popular in the United States, but the UK is still adapting lots of great stories for the radio (as well as creating original works).  When visiting a BBC radio website, I discovered that one featured audio drama was a mystery featuring “Scotland Yard’s laziest sleuth.”  It was advertised as being hilarious, and I felt I could use a laugh, so I listened to it and found the slovenly Dover highly entertaining.  I discovered that this was part of a series based on Joyce Porter’s novels, and I eventually found and listened to the other four adaptations, plus the original story not based on Porter’s works but featuring her characters.  All of them were great fun.

 

I did a little research, and found out Porter wrote twenty books.  At the time, her Dover novels were just going out of print in the U.S., but I was able to find eight of her Dover books brand new for just a few dollars each, and inexpensive editions of her other three Dover books used.  It was a lot harder to find affordable copies of the Eddie Brown and Hon Con books, as the Brown books hadn’t been released in paperback in the U.S. or published since their original release, and the Hon Con books were similarly out of print.  I managed to find inexpensive copies of some of the books, and spent the next few years checking book websites regularly, as most used copies of the other books were quite pricey.  Every so often, I’d find another book for less than ten dollars, and buy it.  Finally, I had everything she ever published.

 

I had such fun with all of Porter’s books that I felt she deserved a wider audience.  So with the Dover books finally being released as e-books in the U.S., I wrote a book about Porter to publicize her.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

 

 

Story Profile: “The Adventure of the Wisconsin Hodag”

Story Profile: “The Adventure of the Wisconsin Hodag”

 

I’ve mentioned August Derleth’s affectionate pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, Solar Pons, earlier on this blog.  While Derleth crafted Pons to be in the same fictional universe as Holmes, due to copyright issues Holmes never actually appeared directly in a story alongside Pons.  The legal situation has changed, and Solar Pons and Sherlock Holmes now solve cases together in a pair of anthologies by Belanger Books: The Meeting of the Minds: The Cases of Sherlock Holmes and Solar Pons Volume I and Volume II.

 

My story, “The Adventure of the Wisconsin Hodag,” appears in Volume II.  Based on the real legend of a mysterious beast said to run rampant in the woods of Wisconsin, as well as the true story of how the executive offices of the President of the United States were relocated to Northern Wisconsin for one fateful summer, “The Adventure of the Wisconsin Hodag” has Holmes, Pons, and Pons’ friend Parker travelling to the American Midwest.  August Derleth himself makes an appearance in this story that features sightings of a mythical beast, and a terrifying conspiracy with international implications.

 

Belanger Books is responsible for the revival of the Solar Pons series over the last couple of years, and with luck, anthologies like The Meeting of the Minds will earn the detective new fans.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^thfrom MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

Mr. Bland Man

 Mr. Bland Man

 

Everybody has their own preferences about what they like most about fiction.  For me, I can’t connect with a book unless I can form some sort of emotional connection with the characters.  I don’t necessarily have to like the people, though it helps.  I can be annoyed by them, I can despise them, and in the best cases, I’m intrigued by them and wonder about the aspects of their lives outside of what’s recounted in the novel.

 

As I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries lately, I’m sad to say I’m often disappointed by the characters.  All too often, I have the same disillusioned, brooding protagonist who’s licking the wounds of a failed relationship, is a total skeptic about everything, and is generally a cookie-cutter copy of a hundred other antiheroes just like him.  One of the problems with reading a lot is when something’s unoriginal, it’s a lot easier to catch it.  Ultimately, it’s a little sad to realize that the protagonists of fifty books are essentially interchangeable.

 

And the problem is, so many of these characters in fiction today are utterly bland and boring.  None of them are in any way distinctive or memorable.  Looking at the pantheon of great fictional detectives– Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Father Brown, Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane, Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Perry Mason, DCI Dover, the Hon Con… they’re all larger than life characters.  Not only do they linger in the reader’s imagination forever, but it’s an extreme challenge for actors to play the roles without seeming too small for the part, and those rare actors who are able to embody the role properly become legends.

 

Writing is a challenge in the best of times, but creating characters that aren’t just well-developed, but are actually legends, is a true achievement, one that is all too rare these days.  In the last thirty years, how many fictional detectives have actually entered the general public imagination?  Indeed, in the last three decades, how many fictional characters outside of Harry Potter and a few other youth series have entered the popular imagination, if film and television adaptations are not taken into account.  Not very many…

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.