Category Archives: Adventure

The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

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Second in this talented team’s genre mashup, The Railway Conspiracy builds on the characters introduced in last year’s The Murder of Mr. Ma. Set in London in 1924, the series’ main characters are Judge Dee Ren Jie, based on a real-life Tang Dynasty jurist and the traditions of Sherlock Holmes; Lao She, a university professor who plays Watson to Dee’s Holmes; Sergeant Hoong, owner of a shop selling Chinese goods, and the man you want with you when there’s a fight brewing; and Jimmy Fingers, whose business tends more to monkey but whose acquaintanceship with the London underworld comes in handy.

In this story, three great powers—Russia, Japan, and a power-hungry Chinese warlord are vying for control of the railways being developed in China. The precarious state of the Chinese Nationalist government and the persistent growth of the Chinese Communist party are ripe for political turmoil. Rumors of a conspiracy to take over the railways swirl about, including at the elegant dinner table of Madam Wu Ze Tian, to whom Dee, uncharacteristically, seems to be forming an attachment.

The next morning, one of the dinner party guests is dead. Bodies begin to pile up, and Dee and Lao must figure out how the deaths are connected and who is responsible. All they seem to have in common is an interest in the railway politics playing out several thousand miles east.

Rozan and Nee’s evocation of 1920s London is charming. Lots of cabs; lots of walking. The authors make especially good use of Dee’s ability to impersonate the Victorian folkloric character, Spring-heeled Jack. Lots of martial arts prowess is on display—perhaps a bit too much near the story’s climax—but it’s easy to follow. Jimmy Fingers always provides some humor, and Lao’s self-deprecating style doesn’t mask his substantial contribution to their investigations. The London constabulary is a source of both help and, as often, shortsighted decisions.

If Nee is well grounded in visualizing superheroes, Rozan is an award-winning writer of detective and crime fiction. Together their books are pure fun—Adventures with a capital A. Cultural insights along the way add spice.

Four times a year I send a short e-newsletter with the best in what I’m reading and viewing, news about my own writing, and other interesting tidbits. Subscribe with this link and receive a pdf of three award-winning short stories!

Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father’s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.

I particularly liked the author’s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor café table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It’s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.

You don’t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn’t share his family’s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears’ determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn’t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family’s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has “lived it” vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn’t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it’s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.

Alan is also a trained chef, and you’ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he’s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. Jó étvágyat!

P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes. — VW

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.

The March of Television

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This spring promises several new television seasons and series that should be worth watching. But first, let me praise the extremely quirky Interior Chinatown, which we’ve watched over the last few months. It’s based on a 2020 novel by Charles Yu, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. A couple of episodes in, I realized I’d actually read this book. I did not get it at all. My reaction: “Huh?”

But someone must have, and the transition to the small screen is terrific. Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, a background character in a police drama set in a fictional city. His parents, especially his mom, have some hilarious moments, as does his fellow waiter, Fatty Choi, who thrives on insulting the restaurant’s customers. The plot is essentially indescribable, but Wu is on a quest to find out what happened to his older brother, whom the TV show calls “Kung Fu Guy.” Many hilarious and heartfelt moments. Watch it on Hulu.

On TV this spring, I’m looking forward to the televised version of Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, a book I enjoyed immensely. In it, a cop who works in Philadelphia’s rough Kensington neighborhood, scene of a series of prostitute murders, never escapes the fear that one day what she’ll find is the body of her renegade sister. Amanda Seyfried plays the police officer, Mickey Fitzpatrick. Excellent family interactions in the novel; I hope they’re preserved. Coming on Peacock March 13.

Damian Lewis will reprise his role as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the third book in the late Hilary Mantel’s riveting series about Tudor political shenanigans involving the King, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), and Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce). The books were great, and the acting in this series, first aired in 2015 as Wolf Hall, is exceptional. Wolf Hall was the ancestral home of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, the one (out of eight) he presumably most loved. It’s premiering March 23 on PBS.

Another season of Dark Winds arrives March 9 on AMC. This crime series, set on Arizona’s Navajo reservation, is based on Tony Hillerman’s popular books featuring Sheriff Joe Leaphorn and his deputy Jim Chee. Leaphorn is played by Zahn McClarnon, an actor I came to admire in the Longmire series, and Chee by Kiowa Gordon. The rest of the mostly Native American cast is also strong. And you can’t beat the beautifully stark Southwestern landscape.

I’ll also give a try to the British detective drama Ludwig, which aired on the BBC in 2024, but will be available on BritBox starting March 20. The title character (played by actor-comedian David Mitchell) is a puzzle-maker, and Ludwig is his pen name. His identical twin brother (I know, I know, beware of twins) is a Cambridge police DCI who’s gone missing. Ludwig poses as his brother to get access to police information about the disappearance. He is, of course, taken for the detective, and becomes caught up in the department’s investigations. Puzzle-solving should come in handy.

Where Legends Lie

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My friend Michael A. Black, a retired Chicago police officer, writes crime fiction and westerns. Now, I grew up with television (and movie!) westerns and spent a lot of time in what I thought of as the West—that is, West Texas where my grandparents lived—so I have a kind of sentimental attachment to the genre. When I was a kid, it seemed heroes and villains were made of very different stuff, and there was no doubt which was which. You could tell by their clothing, if nothing else (think of the Lone Ranger’s perfectly pressed shirt. What?) I met Roy Rogers and Trigger when I was 3. Clint Eastwood and the man with no name spaghetti Westerns began to add ambiguity and complexity, but in recent years, I found Walt Longmire and fell in love again.

Naturally, I’ve eagerly read several of Mike Black’s Westerns and, in his latest one, he pulls off quite a comfortable literary marriage. He manages to combine both traditional Western tropes and the 20th century’s most powerful cultural interpreter and mis-interpreter—Hollywood!

This is one of those split-narrative books that, when you’re reading one thread—say, events that occurred in Contention City, Arizona, in 1880—and the next chapter switches to the other narrative—the 1913 movie-making about those events—you’re momentarily jarred and possibly a bit disappointed because the 1880 (or 1913) story is so captivating.

In 1913, a veteran of the war in the Philippines, Jim Bishop, arrives statewide having no discernible job prospects. But his buddy has a relative working as a chef for a movie company in southern California. He’s counting on a job there and thinks they may take on Jim, too. En route, they befriend, of all people, journalist and fiction-writer Ambrose Bierce, always up for adventure, who disappeared that year. Jim and his friend get the movie jobs and Jim, especially, proves himself useful to the film company in various ways.

In 1880, Sheriff Lon Dayton hopes to end the reign of one of the Arizona’s outlaw gangs by offering the governor’s amnesty if they will turn themselves in. They agree. Unbeknownst to Dayton, the Mayor and his unscrupulous henchmen have other plans.

The chance to experience (fictional) 1880 events and the filmmakers’ recreation of them provides a nice contrast between two realities. The title of the book suggests that what we know about past events can be both unearthed, where they lie, and untrue, as they fib.

I greatly enjoyed the character of Jim, whom you first meet in a truly hair-raising battle overseas, which displays not only Black’s skill in creating a vivid scene, but reflects the multiple aims of a soldier at war. Staying alive, sure, but also saving whom you can and appreciating the enemy too. Dayton is a western hero in the full Gary Cooper tradition. No wonder Hollywood latched onto him like a rattlesnake on a mouse. If you’re looking for a story packed with adventure, as well as a reflection on how we mold the past to suit our present, you’ve found it!

Order from Amazon here.

Weekend Movies? Fun, but not Must-Sees

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The Widow Clicquot

We liked the movie The Widow Clicquot, because, well—France, champagne, why not? You know, the orange label (trailer). The scenery was beautiful, and the film was directed by Thomas Q. Napper. Though the predictable plot didn’t break any new ground, it lulls you into a deep sense of enjoyment. In the early 1800s, the unexpectedly widowed Barbe-Nicole Clicquot (Haley Bennett) can either give up or resolve to implement the vision of her late, adored husband (Tom Sturridge) as to how a champagne winery should operate. The odds are against her.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences: 85%.

Thelma

It’s exhilarating to see June Squibb, as an irrepressible 93-year-old woman doing her thing, not to mention the last performance of the late Richard Roundtree (trailer). Both of them made the film worthwhile, though it was a little disappointing that director Josh Margolin didn’t stretch them beyond the predictable. In the story, grandma Thelma is bilked out of $10,000 by a scammer pretending to be her grandson (Fred Hechinger). How she resolves to get her money back and becomes a superannuated action hero to try, is the plot. I must say that, although there are comic moments, having seen most of them in multiple viewings of the film’s trailer, not much was left to discover! Parker Posey, as Thelma’s daughter, is a terrifying helicopter mom. But, if you’re feeling old and cranky, it’s a good one.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 99%; audiences: 83%.

The Infiltrator

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When the tropes of crime fiction—the secrets, the deceit, the evasions, the jealousies—become too much, that’s when a no-holds-barred thriller like TR Hendricks’s new The Infiltrator can be a welcome cleanse. It’s a vein-scouring adventure as you follow retired US Marine and wilderness survival expert Derek Harrington in his effort to extirpate a dangerous group of domestic terrorists.

The Infiltrator is the second book in a series that began in 2023 with The Instructor and can be expected to have at least one more sequel, in order to tie up loose ends. I haven’t read the first book, but that was no handicap to enjoying this one. The only missing piece was why the terrorists were doing what they were doing, but if you accept the premise that they are on some kind of wild and crazy mission, the why is pretty much irrelevant.

The methods Derek uses to stay perfectly hidden in the woods while on a weeks’-long surveillance assignment are quite inventive, though in the early pages, you may feel you’re reading a catalog for survivalists’ gear. The communications lingo will be immediately clear to readers with military experience, but, even as a civilian, I still could follow it easily.

Derek is hiding in the hills of rural West Virginia, watching members of a terrorist group called Autumn’s Tithe prepare for a major attack. Although no longer in the military, he has some official standing. He’s been deputized by the FBI, and can call in massive military and law enforcement resources when he needs to (OK, give the author some leeway). He experiences a conflict of conscience right up front, because the terrorists live as a large family. He sees the wives and children who may become casualtiesm, and some of those kids are his son’s age.

You don’t have to wait for the end of Chapter One for the terrorists to make their move. A three-vehicle convoy, including a fertilizer-bomb-laden box truck and a van of heavily armed terrorists, leaves the camp, intent on committing mass murder. Derek calls it in. A Hellfire missile operated by a soldier way across the country in Arizona destroys the convoy, followed by two attack helicopters whose weapons subdue the people left behind in the camp. Next arrive members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team who take prisoners.

In case this sounds like a massive exercise in commando-porn, rest assured that before long, you learn the situation has a number of nuances. Almost inevitably, they’re political. Relatively modest objections to conducting such a violent attack on US citizens in their home country are raised.

Part of what this mission was intended to be—a clean-up operation of Autumn Tithe remnants—included capturing their leader, a former FBI agent. Her role makes this pursuit personal for Derek’s colleagues. But it’s also clear that somewhere in government, a mole is revealing vital information about the FBI’s plans. Bureaucracy and unimaginative, by-the-book leadership rear their ugly heads too. Of course, Derek’s methods don’t appear in any book, so conflict between him and the top dogs is inevitable.

While the ongoing adventure keeps the pages rapidly turning, author Hendricks clearly enjoyed writing the fight scenes and, at times, dragged them out past the point of plausibility. He is a former US Army captain who served as a tank platoon leader and military intelligence officer in Iraq and an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s intelligence arm.

As we say in our house, “If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this one.”

Order your copy here, and Amazon will send me a micropayment!

The Coming Storm

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The Coming Storm is a much-anticipated follow-up to Greg Mosse’s well-regarded 2022 debut thriller, The Coming Darkness. The new book takes up the complex, futuristic plot of the first novel. I hadn’t read the earlier book, and there were some situations I didn’t completely understand, at least at first, but that really didn’t affect my experience of this new book. Mosse so effectively establishes that the deteriorating social and political situation in his dystopian future matters greatly to the characters that a little ambiguity didn’t put me off.

Mosse writes about a future (the year is 2037) we can see, at least dimly, especially on our bad days. Eco-terrorism. Drought and a rapidly warming climate. Strange, difficult-to-treat infections. And hazards of any era: people in power who can’t be trusted and whose self-interest trumps any impulse to do good.

The action takes place mostly in France and North Africa. The main character, Alexandre Lamarque, is widely regarded as “the man who saved the world” from eco-terrorism. This is an embarrassing level of notoriety he’d just as soon do without. And it’s made him a target. But of whom? Or who all?

Three eco-terrorism plots are in play: opposition to the enlargement of a dam, a plot to destroy the Aswan dam which will practically annihilate Egypt, and sabotage in the lithium mining industry.(I was a bit puzzled by the references to lithium mining, as I thought lithium does not occur in concentrations that would allow it to be mined in any conventional way, but perhaps I missed that explanation.)

Cutting back and forth between these several ambitious plots and Lemarque’s efforts to discover and thwart them, the story speeds along. While Lemarque and his colleagues are strong characters, the terrorists themselves remain somewhat shadowy. Lurking way in the background is a man who seems to be the main plotter, living on a Caribbean island near Haiti, who is the least believable of all.

The unfolding of the terrorists’ plans is certainly exciting. Yet I couldn’t help a bit of a bait-and-switch feeling when I realized they wouldn’t be resolved by the end of the book. Of course, they’re all so significant that, realistically, they can’t be dealt with in any quick way, so perhaps, in spreading the action over several volumes, Mosse has made a good choice. One that will require Book Three, at least. People who read and enjoyed the first book will be happy to see this follow-up and will no doubt look forward to the story’s ultimate resolution. The Coming Storm terrorists are not finished, and neither is Lamarque. And certainly not Mosse.

The Innocents by Bridget Walsh

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This is the second in the entertaining historical mystery series Bridget Walsh launched last year with The Tumbling Girl. The stories are set in a somewhat seedy Victorian England music hall called the Variety Palace.

The Innocents takes its title from a mass-casualty event that occurred at Christmastime fourteen years before the main story. In a different theater, subsequently closed, a sold-out audience of children had been promised presents after the show. Actors on stage threw the treats toward the audience in the stalls. Seeing they would never get any of the presents, the children seated upstairs in the balconies and galleries rushed downstairs only to find that the doors into the main auditorium bolted shut against them. In the massive pileup of small bodies, pushing and shoving, many children were injured and one hundred eighty-three suffocated. No one was ever held to account for the tragedy—a bitter pill in the hearts of a great many families.

Minnie Ward, protagonist of the earlier novel and this one, is a skit-writer for the Variety Palace. She is temporarily in charge of the Palace while her boss, Edward Tansford (Tansie) recovers from the tragic events recounted in the earlier book. (While author Walsh makes frequent reference to those events, it isn’t necessary to have read the earlier novel in order to follow the story in this one.) Minnie is again teamed up with former policeman, now private detective, Albert Easterbook. You can’t help but believe that, if the series goes on long enough, those two will finally capitulate to their obvious mutual attraction, but so far Minnie is holding fast. Well, wavering.

Now it’s 1877, and the theater world has experienced a series of recent murders. They hit close to home when one of the Palace’s performers reports his brother missing and asks for Minnie’s help. When Minnie and Albert discover the missing man’s body in his dressing room, the realization gradually takes hold that all of the dead were connected in some way to the Christmastime tragedy. What’s more, all the deaths involved some form of suffocation. With so many people and families affected by the children’s deaths, it’s a challenge for Minnie and Albert to figure out where to begin their investigations.

Tansie reemerges, ready to take the helm of the Palace again but soon distracted again—this time by the disappearance of his monkey, who, he believes, has been snatched by a nefarious character who runs dog fights. Here Walsh gives you a peek at not just the talented and sometimes tony denizens and patrons of the Victorian theater world, but also a look at a decidedly seamy side of London life. Her vivid descriptions of these distinctive settings and the picturesque people they attract add considerably to the charm of the whole narrative.

Of course Albert worries about Minnie’s safety and of course she takes chances she shouldn’t, but in the fast pace of events here, you don’t have time to dwell on her occasional lapses of good sense. Nor do you lose confidence in the basic goodness of the main characters. Flaws and all, they are eminently likeable (even the monkey, who hides in the theater’s rafters and pees on the audience below).

Meanwhile, other complications have arisen. There’s plenty of plot here, engaging characters, a  colorful setting, and a fast pace. If you like to lose yourself in another era with a solid historical mystery, this is one you may really enjoy!

It’s a Fast-Changing World. It’s the 1880s!

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Each Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery volume, published by Belanger Books, includes at least a dozen stories, filling in the years 1881-1886. Holmes and Watson were already together then, but Watson was uncharacteristically quiet about their adventures. In Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, edited by Richard T. Ryan, contemporary writers make up for Watson’s reticence, creating excellent adventures to help fill in the gap.

Naturally, the challenges in writing a story set almost 140 years ago are significant. No cell phones, no video surveillance, no DNA evidence, no criminal databases, and no other scientific or organizational trappings modern crime stories employ. I asked my fellow authors whether these differences are a help with their stories or a hindrance. Here’s what they said:

The Victorian setting allows for a more “classical” mystery, says George Gardner. For his story, he researched how much the Victorians knew about dynamite. He admits that he “may have bent some rules in terms of chronology there,” but since dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in 1866, George is on pretty solid ground, it seems.

The Victorian setting “is an advantage more than a hindrance as the instantaneousness of modern communications can get in the way of a good story,” says Kevin Thornton. The telegraph is the fastest communications technology available to Holmes, and in Thornton’s two stories, he makes good use of it. Another advantage, says George Jacobs, is that he can “keep Holmes’s mind at the forefront of the adventure.” What’s more, “having to rush around London (or farther afield) on foot or in a cab, and sometimes engage in fisticuffs with the villains” adds to the adventure.

The authors strive to be sure that not just the technology, but “the feel of every story is right,” too, says Katy Darby. This includes language and dialog, style and social etiquette, and even making sure the types of characters are true to their times. How to accomplish this? Darby says, “The 1860s-1880s is my second home, period-wise, and my Victorian library is ever-growing.” Shelby Phoenix noted what is an extra attraction of the Victorian era for her: It “allows for so many more paranormal approaches, and who can say no to making things seem spooky?”

It’s really a balance. By setting a story in the Victorian era, authors avoid having modern technology “short-circuit the elaborate investigation” they’d planned. Nevertheless, Holmes’s era was one of rapid scientific and technological progress, and authors must pinpoint when these advances took hold, says D.J. Tyrer. Over the period in which the Holmes stories are set—roughly 1885 to 1914—much about society, science, and politics changed. But, “whatever level of technology Holmes has access to,” says author Paul Hiscock, “I always see him as being at the cutting edge of forensic science.” Whatever the technological details, “a good mystery is about how the detective puts all the pieces of evidence together.”

Many authors say that one of the aspects of writing in that era that they like best is delving into those details. As an example, Kevin Thornton’s two linked stories involving shenanigans related to new North American transcontinental railways offered numerous enticing rabbit holes for this author to pursue. As Watson extols the excitement of shortening travel times, Holmes points out that “as the citizenry disperses, so does crime.” This observation foreshadows a visit from a representative of the much-indebted Canadian Pacific Railroad, fearful of a hostile takeover. Watson needs an explanation of this financial predicament, which leads to a lucid explanation of the constraints faced by a publicly traded company. Other examples of Thornton’s research include descriptions of the myriad ways Holmes could visually identify an American, military training, Eastern martial arts, American railroad moguls, the action of poison, and the lineage of the Earl of Derby, the Honourable Frederick Stanley. (In 1888, Stanley became Governor General of Canada, and Thornton helpfully notes that the famous hockey trophy is named for him.)

See how these authors put fact and fiction together. Their stories in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885 are:
George Gardner – “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb”
Kevin Thornton – “Tracks Across Canada” and “Tracked Across America”
George Jacobs – “The Mystery of the Cloven Cord”
Katy Darby – “The Adventure of the Lock Hospital”
Shelby Phoenix – “Sherlock Holmes and the Six-Fingered Hand Print”
D.J. Tyrer – “The Japanese Village Mystery”
Paul Hiscock – “The Light of Liberty”