A Sandal from East Anglia: A New Sherlock Holmes Mystery

Elementary, my dear reader. What else, after fifty years of enjoying the stories of Sherlock Holmes, is a recently retired gentleman to do with his time but write more stories about the world’s most beloved detective. Craig Stephen Copland confesses that he discovered Sherlock Holmes when, some time in the muddled early 1960s he pinched his older brother’s copy of the immortal stories and was forever afterward thoroughly hooked. He is very grateful to his high school English teachers in Toronto who inculcated in him a love of literature and writing, and even inspired him to be an English major at the University of Toronto. There he was blessed to sit at the feet of both Northrup Frye and Marshall McLuhan, and other great literary professors, who led him to believe that he was called to be a high school English teacher. It was his good fortune to come to his pecuniary senses and abandoned that goal and pursued a varied professional career that took him to over one hundred countries and endless adventures. He considers himself to have been and to continue to be one of the luckiest men on God’s good earth. A few years back he took a step in the direction of Sherlockian studies and joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada-also known as the Toronto Bootmakers. In May of 2014 this esteemed group of scholars announced a contest for the writing of a new Sherlock Holmes mystery. Although he had never tried his hand at fiction before, Craig entered and was pleasantly surprised to be selected as one of the winners. Having enjoyed the experience he decided to write more of the same, and is now on a mission to write a new Sherlock Holmes mystery that is related to and inspired by each of the sixty stories in the original Canon. He currently lives and writes in Toronto, New York, the Okanagan Valley, and Tokyo, and looks forward to finally settling down when he turns ninety.