Once these stories have been read, you will never see Lestrade, Gregson, Watson, Holmes, and the others the same way again.
Now on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mx-publishing/sherlock-holmes-and-the-scotland-yarders?fbclid=IwY2xjawJn1IxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHszPy-Ai8-Z3k1GmbpqjRAdsGSRuTnYuOJ48PdZvoMS_WyONpAxz-zHIJ16I_aem_p6QIs6CaOiSiZXT_MAo-pg
Having disappeared long ago, and remaining unavailable for years, this amazing story arc, told over nine volumes, is finally back, and available from MX Publishing - and here's some background.
(The following is the Editor's Foreword to the series . . . .)
Back in 2008, it was still a different Sherlockian world from today.
In those days, the quest for more excellent Holmes adventures beyond the pitifully few sixty Canonical adventures was still quite difficult. Each year, only a few slipped through the needle’s-eye clutch of the moribund major publisher model. (In fact, if one is still publishing by that route, then this fact remains true.) But there were many Holmes adventures waiting to be revealed, and they just needed an outlet. Is it any wonder that the Internet was that path?
Holmes pastiches have been around since William Gillette’s 1899 play, Sherlock Holmes, showing that Our Heroes’ adventures did not have to pass across the first Literary Agent’s desk. Some amazing and accurate adventures appeared on the radio in the 1930’s, courtesy of visionary Edith Meiser. And the door kept getting wider, with more radio shows, films, and the occasional book giving us more traditional, authentic, and Canonical Holmes.
But it was not enough.
In 1998, fanfiction.net was created, allowing another outlet for sharing Holmes’s adventures, wherein those who had discovered them could get them directly to starving readers immediately, without facing the impossible discouragement of the faceless soul-dead major publishing model. I was fortunate to discover the site a few years after that, and began to visit regularly to read and print and archive stories about the True Holmes.
There are thousands of Holmes stories located there, but many are parodies, or anachronistic, or related to modernized and offensive simulacrums, or with incorrect ghost-busting leanings. Others were clearly written by individuals who have no clue about Sherlock Holmes, or have hijacked him for their own agendas. These stories may be ignored, even if they have to be waded through – for buried in the muck of this backyard goose lot, for those who take time to look, are some true and rare jewels.
And in April 2008, the beginning of a couple of stories were posted, “An Ordinary Meeting” on the tenth, and “Truth is the Critic” the next day, both as written by an author going under the curious sobriquet of aragonite. “An Ordinary Meeting” gives details of Lestrade’s first consultation with Sherlock Holmes, and “Truth is the Critic” is written from the perspective of the Scotland Yard inspectors as they read A Study in Scarlet – and providing their reactions when see how Watson has described them. These were well written and interesting, and this approach really hadn’t been attempted before.
(To be accurate, there had been some stories about the Yarders, but they were inconsistent. For instance, M.J. Trow’s long Lestrade series veers wildly from legitimate mysteries to unreadable parodies, with particularly bogus attacks on Sherlock Holmes, and Trow inexplicably gives Inspector G. Lestrade the first name of “Sholto”.
In “Truth is the Critic”, aragonite was already painting the Yarders – Inspectors Lestrade, Gregson, Bradstreet, and Hopkins in particular – in well-rounded and respectful ways that hadn’t been seen before. They had their own life stories beyond The Canon, and weren’t just the inspector du jour appearing in this-or-that Canonical tale. Who knew then that this new author, slipping quietly onto the scene, had such an overall vision for these individuals, with fully realized details about their personal lives, their backgrounds and histories . . . and a plan for a massive overarching adventure that would span decades in their lives?
Over the next few months, more stories quickly followed – “A Cookout in Cornwall”, “Route to Madness”, and “Just Inspector Will Do” (my all-time favorite of these works, relating the events on the Paddington platform when Mary Watson awaits her husband’s return from the Continent in mid-May 1891. I re-read it every year on Reichenbach Day.) But on April 17th, 2008, aragonite raised the stakes, publishing the first chapter of a novel, A Sword for Defense, the first of a massive story arc relating what Watson and Lestrade and the other Yarders faced in the months after Holmes’s supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls.
While keeping one story going would overwhelm many authors, aragonite – whomever he or she was – had even greater ambitions. New stories and chapters began to be posted at a feverish pace. A week after Sword started, another serialized novel began, You Buy Bones, telling how Watson, in early 1882 and fresh from his first year living with Holmes in Baker Street, comes across a monstrous crime that directly and personally affects the Scotland Yard inspectors. And a few months after that, aragonite started another novel that served as a prequel leading to Sword called The MoonCursers, telling of Lestrade’s own terrifying adventures in late April and early May 1891, occurring at the same time Holmes and Watson were playing cat-and-mouse with Moriarty, on their way to a fateful encounter in Meiringen.
Over the course of that summer, nearly every day brought some new chapter: Sometimes another episode in A Sword for Defense or You Buy Bones or The MoonCursers, and at other times a seemingly stand-alone story that that filled in some crucial and interesting aspect about the Scotland Yarders that only made the overall painting richer and deeper.
Imagine if Charles Dickens were writing and publishing three serialized novels at once, and adding in short stories too. And they were going straight from being written to being posted for public consumption as soon as they were complete. And clearly the overall storyline wasn’t being generated along the way – there was a plan, for little threads mentioned here and there about Lestrade’s boyhood or Bradstreet’s family had massive importance much later. Over many months during this time, aragonite was also constructing another massive work, Test of the Professionals, which related the events after You Buy Bones and served as a set-up for A Sword for Defense, telling us much more about Lestrade’s past, his unfortunate and dangerous life-long connection with Professor Moriarty’s agent, the truly evil Jethro Quimper, and the escalating and terrifying events surrounding his courtship with Clea Cheatham.
In August 2008, with all of this going on, aragonite started another brilliant novella, A Secondary Stain, the other events of “The Second Stain”, in which Lestrade was not as clueless as he appears in Watson’s manuscript, actually working behind the scenes to assist Holmes’s investigation. It was the brilliance of this story that finally prompted me to write a fan letter.
Using the fan fiction website’s messenger feature, I emailed an extensive message to aragonite in October 2008, and soon received a wonderful and informative reply.
First, I learned that aragonite was really Marcia Wilson. In subsequent communications, I learned that aragonite – which curiously I’d never looked up before then – is calcium carbonate used by marine organisms to build their shells and skeletons. Since aragonite can be found in cave formations, and since Marcy is a caver – the evidence of which can be found in some of her stories brilliantly dealing with caverns and London’s Lost Rivers – I suspect that’s why she chose the unusual pen-name.
Over many emails over many years, Marcy has explained to me that she wrote so prolifically in those early years because she had insomnia, and that was a very productive time to write. She also could see all of these scenes, and almost couldn’t write fast enough to convey them. In her very first reply to me in October 2008, she explained, how she approached telling the Yarders’ story, and why she named Inspector G. Lestrade Geoffrey:
I’ve never liked the playing down of characters. It’s a lazy way to pump up the character in your mind. I have to be very careful not to wander into the Fangirlyverse. Usually I deal with it by giving a character a name I dislike, and for some reason, I dislike Geoffrey so naturally I stuck it on the poor guy.
She also explained that:
I was so bleeding tired of writing against another person’s notions on Holmes and Watson that I just went to another character that I rather liked. (When I was younger, I hated Lestrade. He should have been kowtowing to Holmes' genius like all of us!) Later on, I realized that it took a pretty remarkable man to refuse to see Holmes in a reverent light. [The] clues about Lestrade were subtle and interesting. There had to be a reason for someone who was supposed to be such a good cop to stay a police inspector after his initial promotion. I made him a Celtic Breton out of a half-thought. I was seeing Colin Jeavons in my head, and he’s so Welsh he’s probably half-Neanderthal! Being a Breton or a Channel Islander would have made [Lestrade] an English citizen, but he would not have been accepted as an equal in race or status by many people.
Our communications continued, as did her writing. By early 2009, A Sword for Defense was complete, and the next book in the ongoing saga, The Narrow Path had commenced. Those were great days to be a Sherlockian and to be reading fanfiction.net, as there were other great authors there as well – "Westron Wynde" for instance - all with powerful and correct understandings of the True Holmes. These authors were writing for the fans, and also for each other, and I was privileged to be in contact with many of them. In a few years, Marcy and Westron Wynde – who turned out to be amazing pasticheur Sarah Bennett, whose works are slowly being made available from Belanger Books – began to take down their online works and publish them in real books. (It was at this time that I let Marcy and Sarah read my first Sherlock Holmes pastiches, written in 2008 and at that point seen by no one but my wife, and with their encouragement I started publicly publishing my stories too.)
Marcy initially published You Buy Bones, along with some related short stories, in 2010 (from Lulu Publishing. That version is now out of print.) Next came Test of the Professionals: Leap Year (2013, also from Lulu and out of print), also collecting the original online novel and working in some supplementary material.
In 2015, I came up with the idea of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, and of course Marcy was in the initial list of invitees. Since then, much of her writing has been turned to contributing stories to these anthologies, having submitted nearly two-dozen. Through these books, she became associated with MX Publishing, who issued a new edition of You Buy Bones in 2015, as well as splitting Test of the Professionals: Leap Year into three planned smaller volumes. The first two, The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon and The Peaceful Night Poisonings, were published by MX in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Unfortunately, due to a combination of events, the third part of Test – the much larger piece called Leap Year that relates the exciting conclusion to that narrative – was not published.
So for the wider public, those who were never able to read Marcy’s massive ouvré on fanfiction.net, her available works consisted of these three novels, and her well-respected stories in the MX anthologies. (Unfortunately, Marcy, Sarah Bennett, and several others were forced to pull their Sherlockian content from fanfiction.net several years ago after some of their works were stolen – copied-and-pasted and then republished under other author names by way of Amazon’s self-publishing program.)
In late 2024, I was in the process of working toward assembling and editing the final volumes, Parts 49, 50, 51, and 52 of the MX anthologies, a process which would continue into early 2025. While looking around in my computer files, I found something I’d forgotten: Years earlier, I had saved and formatted the files for five of Marcy’s novels – those relating to Watson and Lestrade’s adventures during The Great Hiatus. Since the late 1990’s, I’ve printed and archived every traditional Canonical Holmes adventure that I’ve found online – thousands of them – and I have over 175 binders of pure Holmes adventures – including all of Marcy’s now-withdrawn stories. But luckily I had these novels as Word files. And I had an idea . . . .
I contacted Marcy, who hadn’t had time in several years to think about publishing more of her works, and asked if I could shepherd these five novels to publication – pro-bono, just because I was passionate about other people reading these incredible stories. Marcy was willing, and so I started editing with great enthusiasm – even as I was supposed to be editing the final MX volumes, stories for which were rolling in every day.
It soon became apparent to me that to publish these five novels without readers knowing the events of the missing Leap Year would be a confusing mess. Too much happened in these books that continued from what happened in Leap Year. Clearly, that missing volume would need to be edited and published too. And while I was at it, why not re-edit the previously published three books – You Buy Bones, The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon, and The Peaceful Night Poisonings – into an overall cohesive narrative?
MX Publisher Extraordinaire Steve Emecz, THE Sherlockian publisher and the Sherlockian Gutenberg – the man who made Sherlockian publishing accessible to real people instead of guarding a narrow doorway, or deciding that Sherlockian publishing should only be available for a very narrow cadre of self-described elites – was enthusiastic, and ready to proceed immediately. But I needed to actually finish editing the nine books first. It was a joy, and a labor of love to do so.
I had read all of these books serially as published, hopping from story to story as new chapters appeared, back in 2008-2011. But to read the story now, in one place, in order and available in its entirety, made it even more amazing – and exciting for the thought of new readers able to discover this magnificent world: Sherlock Holmes’s London, as seen through the eyes of the Scotland Yarders.
Even as I dug deeper into Marcy’s Scotland Yard adventures, I was remembering the other stories – the previously mentioned A Secondary Stain. Her Yarder’s Christmas novels, Gunnysack Goose for Christmas and A Mouth of Ivy. Short-story collections like Devilry and <i>It’s All in a Name. Other novels and novellas like The Muse of History, Ghosts in the Making, Courage Rises, The Kings and Queens of London, and the World War I narrative, The Days of Our Years. I had amazing fun editing the first nine books that are being published in 2025, and with any luck, I hope to be able to edit the rest of these, along with a collection of Marcy’s MX anthology contributions, over the next year or so, in order to fill in Marcy’s Great Scotland Yard Tapestry.
There are certain authors who “own” other Canonical characters by taking hold of them and defining them. The late Carole Nelson Douglas was Irene Adler’s chronicler. Michael Kurland gives us the best portrait of Professor Moriarty. Will Thomas has absolutely defined Barker, Holmes’s hated rival on the Surrey Side. The late Gerard Williams claimed Dr. Mortimer (even if only for two books), and Susan Knight is easily becoming the definitive voice of Mrs. Hudson.
But Marcia Wilson tells the True Story of the Scotland Yarders – and presents an amazing viewpoint of Holmes and Watson along the way.
I’ve said it many times before, and can’t say it any better now:
Marcia Wilson has found Scotland Yard’s Tin Dispatch Box.
BOOK I: You Buy Bones
In the late 1870’s, Inspector Lestrade consults an eccentric fellow named Sherlock Holmes, little realizing that this is just the beginning. A few years later, in early 1882, Dr. John H. Watson has shared rooms with Holmes for just a year, and he comes across evidence of a terrible crime concerning the family of one of Scotland Yard’s inspectors.
BOOK II: Test of the Professionals – The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon
It’s 1883, and someone is stealing lead (known as “flying blue pidgeon”) from the rooftops of London. Is it just a nuisance crime, or the first obscure clue revealing a staggering conspiracy? Meanwhile, a terrifying figure from Lestrade’s past surfaces, and he meets Miss Clea Cheatham – and her most unique family.
BOOK III: Test of the Professionals – The Peaceful Night Poisonings
Beginning immediately after the events of The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon, Lestrade recovers and his courtship takes tentative first steps while the other Scotland Yard inspectors, along with Holmes and Watson, seek to find the identity of the mysterious figure unifying London’s criminal element – and his connections with Lestrade’s lifelong tormenter.
BOOK IV: Test of the Professionals – Leap Year
In early 1884, a temporary peace has settled over London, as Lestrade’s lifelong enemy seems to be defeated, and his relationship with Clea Cheatham – never boring – is progressing satisfactorily. But it quickly becomes apparent that Lestrade is in deadly danger when he’s lured into a trap beneath London from which there is seemingly no survival.
BOOK V: The MoonCursers
Spring 1891: The case against Professor James Moriarty is almost complete, and movement has begun to destroy his organization – and while Holmes and Watson depart for the Continent and a fateful rendezvous at the Reichenbach Falls, Lestrade is kidnapped by his old enemy, the Professor’s agent, and begins a terrifying journey of his own, both above and below the surface of the earth.
BOOK VI: A Sword For Defense
In mid-1891, Dr. Watson attempts to pick up the pieces of his life following the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes. But his peace is quickly shattered when Colonel James Moriarty, Watson’s own personal foe from his time in India and Afghanistan, declares war on both Watson and the Scotland Yard inspectors who worked with Holmes – all in the name of restoring his dead brother’s reputation, and also to protect a long-standing and truly vile scheme. And Watson can’t reveal to Lestrade any of what happened all those years ago in the days leading up to the Battle of Maiwand. It’s up to Lestrade and the Yarders, working with the hints Watson can share, to take up the investigation.
BOOK VII: The Narrow Path
As Colonel Moriarty’s revenge takes shape, corruption is found within Scotland Yard. Meanwhile, the Yard’s investigation reveals ever more about the Colonel’s own crimes, and the deadly traps he’s set for his enemies.
BOOK VIII: The End of All Things
The gaps in the Yard’s investigation into Colonel Moriarty’s crimes, stretching all the way to his former service in India, begin to close – escalating the danger faced by Watson and the inspectors. Meanwhile, Watson and his friend Dr. Mortimer uncover a new aspect of the vast web of crimes on a remote Scottish island.
BOOK IX: A Fanged and Bitter Thing
In the midst of the battle with Colonel James Moriarty, a devastating event shakes Watson’s life to the very core. Having only his friends from the Yard to lean upon, he soldiers on. Then, with Watson’s life in danger, the Yarders combine forces to mount a rescue, and find themselves in a deadly war they never expected – even as Lestrade races toward the final confrontation with his own lifelong enemy.
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© David Marcum 2025 – All Rights Reserved
“Marcum could be today’s greatest Sherlockian writer . . . .” – Lee Child, New York Times Bestselling Author
“David Marcum is the reigning monarch of all things Sherlockian . . . .” – John Lescroart, New York Times Bestselling Author
"Among the best I must number David Marcum, who, by this point has written more Holmes stories than Doyle himself. Characterized by unflagging imagination and ceaseless ingenuity, along with felicitous prose, these tales continue to provide what we all crave: more Sherlock." - Nicholas Meyer, New York Times Bestselling Author
"Marcum himself again demonstrates his gift for emulating the feel of The Canon . . . ." - Publishers Weekly
David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over 130 Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as Otto Penzler and Lee Child's The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 and The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins, Sherlock Holmes and The Eye of Heka, and The Collected Papers of Sherlock Holmes (117 stories in 7 volumes - so far). He has edited over 100 books, most traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 48 volumes, with more in preparation. The books have raised over $125,000 for the Undershaw school for special needs children, located at one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's former homes.
He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collections of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons and The Further Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books, and subsequently additional volumes of new Pons tales. He has done the same for The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions, as well as the Mystery Writers of America. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small). He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son, and since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015, 2016, and 2024 where you may have spotted him. (A fifth Pilgrimage is planned for May 2025.)If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!
His Amazon Author Page can be found at:
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader
and at MX Publishing:
https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM
