Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Victorian/Edwardian era…

The original Cthulhu Casebooks trilogy is complete in and of itself. The three volumes (Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities and Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-devils) together tell a single terrifying story.

I thought I was done with that particular world, but then a new idea emerged from the swirling murk of my subconscious, and lo and behold, Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors came slouching into life.

This one’s a standalone adventure whose action ranges across the length of Holmes’s professional career and beyond, right up until the aftermath of the First World War. The story dovetails around that of the trilogy, but the novel can be read independently.

It’s also a bit of a beast in terms of size, nearly twice as long as each of the other books in the series. I didn’t plan this, but as I was putting the plot together, I got more and more excited and just kept adding bits. There was too much good stuff to leave any of it out. The synopsis alone, in fact, weighed in at around 17,000 words, or 34 single-spaced A4 pages, pretty much the length of a novella.

There’s alien horror here. There are reanimated corpses. There’s a sinister shapeshifter. There’s a gruelling voyage aboard a whaler to the frozen north. There’s a journey to the edge of our solar system. There are appearances by a number of secondary characters from the canon, several of them in strange, unusual guises. There’s a secret society, a disturbing conspiracy, and a whole lot else besides. Not forgetting plenty of Holmesian deduction and derring-do.

I put a lot of work into this book and I’m very proud of it. And if, as is very possible, it’s my last ever Holmes story, then I’m happy to go out with a bang, having produced a sprawling, epic tale that spans three decades and encompasses everything that I love about Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft. Ending on a high(gate) note, you might say.

 

Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors is now available.

Physical copies of the hardcover can be purchased in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and also online at:

• Amazon UK
• Amazon US
• Amazon Canada
• Amazon Australia
• Titan Books

The ebook edition may be purchased via the usual outlets.

 

Here’s a wonderfully atmospheric short trailer for Three Winter Terrors, put together by the talented folk of the marketing department at Titan Books:

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Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors (out October 2021) is a novel told in three parts. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

1889. The First Terror.
At a boys’ prep school in the Kent marshes, a pupil is found drowned in a pond. Could this be the fulfilment of a witch’s curse from four hundred years earlier?

1890. The Second Terror.
A wealthy man dies of a heart attack at his London townhouse. Was he really frightened to death by ghosts?

1894. The Third Terror.
A body is discovered at a Surrey country manor, hideously ravaged. Is the culprit a cannibal, as the evidence suggests?

These three linked crimes test Sherlock Holmes’s deductive powers, and his scepticism about the supernatural, to the limit.

And here’s that cover image:

 

It’s another bang-up job from designer Julia Lloyd, which manages to incorporate elements from each of the sections into a seamless whole.

I was asked by the Guardian to comment on the dismissal of the lawsuit brought by the Conan Doyle estate against Netflix and everyone else responsible for the Enola Holmes movie.

I think I show my grasp of complex legal proceedings through my use of the phrase “a complete prick”.

 

 

Looking for Christmas gifts for the mystery-lover in your life? Titan Books have a few suggestions, including a couple of familiar-looking Sherlock Holmes novels…

And if you’d like to know a bit more about those books, and their author, FPTV have a video interview for you.

 

 

Lots of reviews of The Beast of the Stapletons are appearing, and all positive, but this one is my favourite so far.

I’ve just recorded a podcast with James and Sam at Squaregroot. They are lovely gents and it was an enjoyable and wide-ranging discussion, focusing largely on my Firefly tie-in novels but also on my Sherlock Holmes books and the Cthulhu Casebooks.

You can listen to it here or here.