The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories has reached its secondary goal of £10,000 in their Kickstarter campaign. Although they now have all the cash they were shooting for, you can still merrily contribute in order to get your copies of the three-volume set (or any individual volume) in a format of your choice before anyone else, including the major retailers.

Interviews with the authors of Volume One (myself included) has appeared on I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. This will be followed by two more sets of interviews for Volumes Two and Three. Check them out if you want to see what makes a bunch of Sherlockians tick. Or if you care to read whatever I blathered on about for “The Song of the Mudlark.”

In other anthology news, my next story, “When the Trains Run on Time,” will be featured in Exile Editions’ The Playground of Lost Toys this fall. Co-editor Colleen Anderson was recently discussing the book and its lineup on her blog. No cover art yet (which is one of the issues she writes about), but I remain watchful. New cover art for a publication I’m in always tickles me.

More announcements are queued up, but I’m stuck waiting for official announcements, air dates and/or contracts. You know, the usual bottlenecks.

When I was a wee nerdling, I once attended a meeting of The Bimetallic Question. It may sound like a sinister secret society, but it’s only the Montreal incarnation of the usual sort of Sherlock Holmes fan club you’ll find sprinkled throughout the world. To this day, they get together once every couple of months in someplace suitably stodgy, talk about Sherlock Holmes, and act all Victorian. Or, if they’re particularly progressively minded, Edwardian.

A highlight of the evening is a quiz about one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. They select a sample from the canon, encourage everyone to refresh their memory, and then ask trivia questions at the gathering. The winner gets a prize, as I recall. This was so long ago, I hadn’t finished reading all sixty of the original adventures. So when I was told we’d be questioned about the contents of The Veiled Lodger, I had to skip ahead and read that one early.

“It’s not very good,” the organizer on the phone warned me in advance.

Sacrilege from a Sherlockian. It was like hearing a Trekkie admit that one of the episodes of The Original Series kinda sucked.

He was right, of course. It wasn’t very good. Conan Doyle was slipping in those last years of his life. After killing off Sherlock Holmes and then bringing him back from the dead due to public demand, his heart often wasn’t in it. There are plenty of gems to be found in those final collections, but some of the stories are lazy rehashes of earlier, better work – or worse, dull original material that lacks the spark that made the characters successful in the first place.

A tasteful illustration rather than the lurid money shot modern audiences might prefer.

The Veiled Lodger is one of those latter examples. It hardly even qualifies as a mystery. Holmes and Watson are summoned to hear a confession from a woman about a case the consulting detective once looked into but didn’t solve because he was never officially engaged. It all plays out as an excuse to get to the shocking finale where the veiled lady raises her veil to reveal what’s left of her face after it got chewed off by a lion. Where’s the accompanying Sidney Paget illustration for this one, I ask you? Okay, he was dead by the time it was published in 1927, but Frank Wiles, his successor, might have come up with something appropriately grisly. I blame The Strand editors for wussing out on the opportunity to horrify its readership.

As is often the case with many characters that endure long after the death of their creators, some of the most intriguing stories were written by subsequent authors. This will irritate purists, but my favourite adventures are often ones created by writers who were free to run with the groundwork Conan Doyle laid decades before them and make sense of his often egregious continuity errors. I’m particularly fond of Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and what Billy Wilder accomplished as screenwriter and director of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (I will forever lament the hour that was cut and largely lost by the studio).

Those examples hardly scratch the surface of what’s out there. As copyrights expired and the property slipped into the public domain, tremendous numbers of pastiches were written and filmed, including far more novels and short stories than Conan Doyle ever managed in his career. I have a good number of them, big and small, in my library. Now I’m looking forward to adding The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories in the fall – for reasons both selfish and charitable. This record-breaking collection is the largest of its type ever assembled, and will feature sixty new adventures of Holmes and Watson set in their proper time period and fitting in with established continuity (tortured as it might sometimes be).

My story, The Song of the Mudlark, will be among the sixty in this three-volume set that will be available in hardcover, paperback and eBook. All royalties will go to the Undershaw Preservation Trust which is restoring the house Sir Arthur Conan Doyle built and lived in while he was writing certain notable tales like The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Empty House (the one that revived the detective after a long hiatus). The Undershaw property is being prepared as the new location for the Stepping Stones school for children with learning difficulties, and they’ll be moving in once the renovations are done.

Undershaw back in the day.

If you’d like to put in an early order and get your copy before everybody else, there’s a Kickstarter page with the usual levels of contribution, depending on how flush you feel. They blew through the initial goal of £2000 within the first couple of days, but the preferred total is £10,000, which will help enormously with the shipping costs of all these heavy tomes.

Additional information about the project and Undershaw can be had in this recent article and this interview with the publisher and editor. Stepping Stones also has a page of their website devoted to the work on Undershaw as its new home.

There was a slight delay, but Locked and Loaded: Both Barrels Vol. 3 was released last week and is now available in physical and eBook forms. I haven’t received my pulp copies yet, but this new scan reveals the back cover for the first time and something I always like to see – a negative review.

“Nightmares written from the ghetto of life,” denounces the one-star Amazon review for the previous volume of the series.

I looked it up, and this particular review (the only negative one for the book, in fact) came from one Betty Jonas, currently ranked number 30,511,827 on Amazon’s top reviewer list with only three reviews to her name. So, yeah, not exactly Roger Ebert. Checking out her other opinions, I was greatly amused by her summary of The Busy Writer’s Tips on Writing Mystery and Crime, which suggested, “You never know, you, or even I, might be the next Mike Hammer.” Classic, considering Mike Hammer is a fictional character. Mickey Spillane was the actual writer who created him.

Ron, the editor, expressed his sincere hope that the current volume will inspire similarly negative reviews. And I can see his point. Why print glowing reviews when the negative ones make a book sound so much more intriguing?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I would like to read some nightmares from the ghetto of life. I would like to hang out with one despicable character after another. And if I’m going to read trash, it might as well be pure trash. Thanks for that glowing recommendation.

Order your copy today and give Betty a hug for me.

It’s been eventful on the crime-fiction front for me lately. The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir is now on shelves (if, indeed, you can still find shelves with physical books for sale – otherwise you can buy it as an eBook from various outlets). Corey Redekop’s mini-interview with me about the anthology has been up for a while. I probably could have written a separate book answering the question “What does ‘noir’ mean to you?” but who has the time to read it, let alone write it? Some people have a very loose interpretation. Unsurprisingly, my definition is married to the concept of film noir which, itself, has been broadly and loosely defined by others. This may have to be a topic for a blog post at some future date because I get asked, far too often, by cinema luddites, “What’s film noir?” whenever I bring up the subject. Yeah, I’ll get around to that right after I try to explain what a spaghetti western is to everybody.

“The View from Inside the Pocket” is my latest short story to appear on Shotgun Honey. It makes its debut today. You can go there now to read it and heaping piles of other crime stories, including two more of my own.

Also from One Eye Press, the cover for Locked and Loaded: Both Barrels Volume 3 has been announced. This new anthology is slated for release on April 21, and will feature my story “Young Turks and Old Wives” among many others. It will be available from the usual suspects.

Shotgun Honey’s official mascot (unofficially Frigga from Thriller: A Cruel Picture AKA They Call Her One Eye AKA Hooker’s Revenge) makes a return appearance for the cover of Volume Three.

At last, there’s photographic evidence that The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir physically exists.

I did not take this photograph, this is not my copy of the book, that is not my cat.

Photo by (presumably) co-editor David Nickle.

But if the editors are getting theirs, my own contributor copy should be arriving in the post sometime soon. The anthology will be on bookstore shelves in March. My short story, “Choke the Chicken,” will be in each and every copy of the book. Cats are sold separately.

Another 700 words of my flash fiction is up on Shotgun Honey today. The Spare allows you, the reader, to enjoy the hardboiled-noir experience firsthand by placing you right in the middle of the action. And the pain. It’s just like virtual reality, except with words on a page, and without the hefty expense of an Oculus Rift and all the associated motion sickness that goes along with it.

Stomach-turning nausea may result regardless.

Book (patent pending) A new high-tech device that allows the user to immerse him or herself in a whole other world, fully realized and stimulating to the imagination. System requirements: enough energy to turn a 2.3 gram page.