This wide-ranging collection of stories takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from their cozy rooms in London, to exploring England's bucolic Lake District, to clambering up an extinct volcano in Scotland. There is murder on the Thames, a spectacularly unpleasant Lord finds himself on the wrong end of a carving knife at the legendary Simpson's-in-the-Strand restaurant, and the brutal slaying of the brilliant Hypatia of Alexandria in 415 CE may finally be solved. Throughout, Holmes and Watson not only endeavour to solve the crimes, but also walk the delicate line of deciding what might be the best and fairest form of justice. Finally, in a more whimsical vein, Holmes and Watson investigate the magic and mystery surrounding Christmas. And so, dear reader, by all means procure the beverage of your choice, settle into your favourite armchair, and dive into these new stories featuring old friends.
This wide-ranging collection of stories takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from their cozy rooms in London, to exploring England's bucolic Lake District, to clambering up an extinct volcano in Scotland. There is murder on the Thames, a spectacularly unpleasant Lord finds himself on the wrong end of a carving knife at the legendary Simpson's-in-the-Strand restaurant, and the brutal slaying of the brilliant Hypatia of Alexandria in 415 CE may finally be solved. Throughout, Holmes and Watson not only endeavour to solve the crimes, but also walk the delicate line of deciding what might be the best and fairest form of justice. Finally, in a more whimsical vein, Holmes and Watson investigate the magic and mystery surrounding Christmas. And so, dear reader, by all means procure the beverage of your choice, settle into your favourite armchair, and dive into these new stories featuring old friends.
I have always enjoyed mysteries, beginning with the “can you solve it?” stories of Encyclopedia Brown and then moving on to the adventures of The Three Investigators, a series of juvenile fiction that had the imprimatur of Alfred Hitchcock himself. For some reason, the tales of the Hardy Boys never appealed to me all that much, but as I grew older, I found myself wading deeper and deeper into the depths of murder, master criminals, and nefarious deeds of all kinds.
There was the amazing output of Agatha Christie, the locked room puzzles of John Dickson Carr, the hard-boiled wizardry of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and any number of critical books and essays that sought to explain and dissect this genre of fiction that was dismissed by so many of the literati, most famously Edmund Wilson in his derisory articles published in The New Yorker in the 1940s. I feel fairly certain that the wise members of Monty Python would dismiss Mr. Wilson as a “silly person,” and so did I, continuing to enjoy the Dover reprints of classic mystery stories, as well as novels by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins that contained some form of puzzle or crime.
However, standing above and beyond all of these authors and their works was a single volume, bound in crimson cloth, obtained at a Bag Day Book Sale, where you could purchase a brown paper grocery bag for one dollar and fill it with as many books as you could make fit. This was, of course, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, a book to rival any other text published since Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century. Sherlock Holmes, to put it simply, was my kind of hero. The sad fact of the matter is that many famous heroes, both fictional and historical, were little more than sociopathic mass murderers, from Achilles and Hercules to Genghis Khan and Napoleon Bonaparte. I could never understand the appeal of these somewhat ludicrous characters. How could anyone possibly admire or want to emulate any of them? For me, they were ridiculous, pathetic men (yep, always men) who were idolized in books written by more ridiculous, pathetic men who for some reason glorified these hopelessly maladjusted bringers of misery and death.
In contrast, Sherlock Holmes had zero interest in power, money, titles, conquests, or murderous exploits of any kind. All that he desired was to use his exceptional talents to help people, whether it might be a Duke or a governess. And beyond merely solving crimes, it was often Holmes himself who decided what might constitute justice. Then as now, the judicial system was rife with inequality and weighted heavily in favor of the wealthy and influential. Given that, Holmes (and the agreeable Dr. Watson) quite happily allowed thieves and murderers to go free in the interest of a greater form of justice. Ultimately, Sherlock Holmes was a kind of refuge compared to a real world that was often baffling, maddening, and manifestly unfair.
After graduating from college, I got the idea into my head to try my hand at a couple of mystery short stories and found a sympathetic reader in Charles E. Fritch, editor of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. One of those stories was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and I feel fairly certain the fact that the magazine went out of business the year after my story was published had little to do with my efforts. For the record, I count being published in a pulp magazine, having my writing publicly burned, and being hanged in effigy as a kind of Triple Crown of writing.
I then stepped away from mystery writing to turn my attentions to other endeavors, one of which was playwriting, and I was fortunate enough to find an artistic home at The Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, MI. After having a few plays produced there, I thought it would be fun to write a Sherlock Holmes play, and concocted a mystery/comedy/romance entitled Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Elusive Ear. The success of that play led to a sequel, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Fallen Soufflé, and then a third effort, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Ghost Machine. Happily enough, all three plays went on to be published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide (TRW) and have had productions from Texas to New Zealand. It was between the second and third play that the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and with theatres shut down, I got the notion into my head to adapt all three plays into novels.
Compared to a novel, a playscript is rather sparse when it comes to the total number of words, since it focuses almost entirely on the dialogue of the characters. Pretty clearly, more comprehensive descriptions and relating the inner thoughts of Watson would need to be added. Knowing that Conan Doyle had written four Sherlock Holmes novels, I settled on a length that would be shorter than The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear, but longer than A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. These three adaptations were subsequently brought out as individual paperbacks by MX Publishing, and also collected in a hardcover entitled Sherlock in Love: The Holmes-Adler Mysteries, then translated into Italian for Mondadori Publishing. On a bit of a Sherlockian roll, MX Publishing was also kind enough to publish my two-volume nonfiction book, Sherlock Holmes: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which was an effort to account for the sustained popularity of the character over three centuries.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, I became aware of the MX Publishing anthology series of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, with all royalties going to the Undershaw School for children with learning disabilities (Undershaw, located in Surrey, was once the home of Arthur Conan Doyle). This good cause appealed to me, but then I was faced with the daunting challenge of trying to write a Canonical Sherlock Holmes pastiche; that is, a story that might have been written by Conan Doyle himself. This was no easy task, because I am, by nature, of a whimsical, absurdist, and often contrarian state of mind. Still, I enjoy a literary challenge, and I knew that I could count on the indefatigable editor of the series, David Marcum, to help wrench my tales into the Procrustean bed of a faithful Sherlock Holmes story.
Ultimately, I wrote seven stories for this series, all of which are contained within this volume. I discovered, to my own amusement, that much like Conan Doyle himself, I found myself drawn to writing stories in which Holmes and Watson not only investigate and solve the crimes, they then act as judge and jury as well. It’s much more satisfying than the real world, in which the wealthy and powerful are rarely held to account for their tsunami of crimes and misdeeds.
Many thanks for picking up this slim volume, and I wish you happy reading!
David MacGregor
Howell, MI, 2025
From London to England's Lake District to Edinburgh, Scotland, Sherlock Holmes and his reliable companion, Dr. John Watson, are always ready to solve the case. In David MacGregor's Sherlock Holmes Takes the Case: Eight Tales of Mystery and Intrigue, the detecting duo travels the length of Great Britain in search of intrigue and crime. For example, they research a case of eight tiny coffins found on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh in “The Adventure of the Scottish Coffins.” They uncover fraud in “The Amateur Mendicant Society” and go mudlarking in the Thames in London. They uncover how an ancient Egyptian scroll went missing in “The Adventure of the Alexandrian Scroll.” And Holmes diverts attention by suggesting multiple solutions in a stabbing in “Death at Simpson’s.”
Each story is cleverly written and tightly plotted. Holmes and Watson are at the peak of their form in each story. MacGregor captures the flavor of the original Conan Doyle detective duo. The hustle and bustle of London is as much a part of the scene as is the Lake District village of Grasmere. MacGregor expertly distinguishes between the “steam-hammer metronome” that is London and the bucolic “gentle peaks” and “burbling waters” around Grasmere. In a couple of stories, Holmes allows a different kind of justice to be done. “Justice is not the sole province of bewigged old men in courtrooms. Justice belongs to us all.” Conan Doyle implied the same sentiment in a few of his stories. The last story has the duo up on the rooftop trying to apprehend a jolly old, gift-giving phenomenon who is aided by a red-nosed hooved creature. Sorry Holmes, it’s not Moriarty.
So, look to be entertained with the stories in this collection. My favorites were “Death of a Mudlark” and “The Adventure of the Mysterious Benefactor.” Which favorites will you choose?