What significant developments in crime detection were taking place in the Edwardian period? Ask Dr Judith Rowbotham who has played a great part in the detail of my plots. Until recently she held the post of Reader in Historical Criminal Justice Studies at Nottingham Trent University, resigning to continue her scholarship as a free-lance independent scholar and broadcaster (recent Time Team etc.), based in London. Her profound knowledge of Victorian history and Victorian print and periodicals is displayed in publications like Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility 1820-2010 (with Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg, 2013).
Further experts consulted include:-
Eric Shelmerdine M.A.B.I. W.A.D. General Secretary, The Association of British Investigators (ABI). Produces an excellent journal.
Roger Johnson, Editor, The Sherlock Holmes Journal, for his unstinting assistance in checking (sometime very)obscure facts. The new publication The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany (History Press) by Roger Johnson and Jean Upton is a must for the world’s millions of aficionados.
Barbara Wolff of Israel’s magisterial Einstein-Archiv for her endless patience in responding to questions concerning Albert Einstein and Lieserl.
Jeff Sobel, for his counsel on weaponry. The son of my former UCLA Dean of Honours, Professor Eli Sobel, Jeff’s knowledge of ancient and modern guns is exemplary.
Mike Noble for his advice on the sort of heavy-game double rifles of the late-Victorian period Colonel Moran might have used.
Jack Reece QPM and Nicola Cox, both at EHSAA, for their invaluable assistance in providing period books on fishing (I not being an angler).
Howard White, who drops by my home every so often and makes really valuable points on the plots as I relate them to him.
My description of the Reichenbach Falls is derived from and in admiration of the short essay The Sherlock Holmes Trail - The Canonical Path To The Falls written in 1948 by Anthony Howlett as a 24 year old Cambridge undergraduate (before he went on to become a founder of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London).
And most of all, to my beautiful partner of many adventurous years on four Continents, Lesley Julia Abdela. She is alongside at every step as a novel goes from inkling to final shape and on to Steve Emecz at MX Publishing.
The Best of Sherlock Holmes Journal, ed. Nicholas Utechin, Vol. 1 (Sherlock Holmes Society of London, 2006).
The Best of Sherlock Holmes Journal, ed. Nicholas Utechin, Vol. 2 (Sherlock Holmes Society of London, 2011). See particularly the following excellent chapters: Nick Utechin, ‘The Supreme Struggle’ and Guy Warrack, ‘Disguises In Baker Street’.
Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820-2010 by Dr Judith Rowbotham, Dr Kim Stevenson and Dr Samantha Pegg (October 2013), for comment on newspaper reading contents and the habits of readers.
Max Beerhohm, Zuleika Dobson or an Oxford Love Story (London, 1911). Atmospheric tongue-in-cheek days of Illi Almae Matri.
H.W. Bell (ed.), Baker-Street Studies, (Constable and Co., 1934). See especially the Introduction by Bell.
James O’Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes, (Oxford University Press, 2013). James O’Brien is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Missouri State University.
Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Sherlock Holmes Companion, (John Murray, 1962).
Vincent Starrett, 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, (Macmillan, 1940).
Christopher Redmond, Sherlock Holmes Handbook, 2nd Edition (Dundurn Press, 2009).
Edgar W. Smith (ed.), Profile by Gaslight, (Simon and Schuster, 1944).
Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, (Canongate, 2013).
Gideon Haigh, On Warne, (Simon and Schuster, 2012). It was when reading this account of the Australian leg-spin bowler Shane Warne that the idea came to me that Holmes may well have been a leg-spin bowler at university and brought this skill - mental as much as physical - through to his work as a Consulting Detective.
Vernon Randell, The London Nights of Belsize, (John Lane, 1917), especially pp.147-57; a curious chapter where a character seems to echo Holmes’s deductive methods. Watson would not like it: Belsize refers to him as ‘that stupid practitioner’.
E. Chivers Davies, Tales of Serbian Life, (Harrap and Co., 1919).
Mary Edith Durham, Through the Land of the Serb, (Edward Arnold, 1904). The picture she paints of a priest and a cave church in a wild landscape is so evocative I have taken the liberty of using very similar words.
Mary Edith Durham, Albania and the Albanians, Selected Articles and Letters 1903-1944, ed. Bejtullah Destani, (Centre for Albanian Studies, 2001).
Michele Zackheim, Einstein’s Daughter: the search for Lieserl, (Riverhead Books, 1999). An engaging detective story in itself and a most valuable research source by an intrepid American author. Her opening sentence is ‘The search for Lieserl began in an old, gray cardboard shoe box. In that box...’. The author brings out the extraordinary nature of Serbian social life where reality and wishful thinking are often bafflingly confused.
Eileen Blumenthal, Puppetry: A World History, (Abrams, 2005). A beautiful and illuminating ‘coffee-table’ book, starting with ‘the origin of species’.
James Brown, The Life And Times of Albert Einstein, (Parragon, 1994), a recommended starter book on Einstein and easily read.
Finally, Wikipedia. I have used the term ‘magical’ for the equation E=MC². For all who use Wikipedia extensively we would use the same word for that great source of information too.
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© Copyright 2012 Tim Symonds and Lesley Abdela
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