#THIF - Thank Holmes It's Friday 2022 - Week 14

Week 14 - Thank Holmes It's Friday 2022

Before the usual notes we wanted to share that it's the last day for an important Kickstarter - Sherlock Holmes: The Poet and His Muse - as we think it's vital to support independent theatre which has had a tough time under the pandemic.

We also have the latest 3 volumes of the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (31-33) and our friends at Belanger Books have launched their latest Solar Pons collection - The Novellas of Solar Pons.

We're also hosting two free live events next week:

The launch of 'New Cases of Sherlock Holmes' and a reading from our bestselling book 'Sherlock Cat and The Missing Mousie'

On to our usual weekly offers:

1. Free Audiobooks 

2. Audio App

3. New Books

1. Free Audiobooks

This week we are offering two free books.

Please use the contact us form, quote #THIF 123 and let us know which country you are from and tell us which three books you would like. Please do let us know if you already have one of the books so we give you codes you can use.

The Dramatic Moment of Fate: The Life of Sherlock Holmes in the Theatre

Sherlock Holmes has been a beloved character from his first story, and his mystique endures to the modern age in print and on screen, but he has had a long life in the theater, as well.

Where did it begin? What are the themes, stories, and characterizations that make his stage presence unique and just as enduring?

Follow his trail on the stage as author Alexandra Kitty curates his fascinating theatrical world throughout the decades: from unlikely Off-Broadway musicals to lauded slapstick comedies, to more traditional and gripping portrayals of his iconic stories and new incarnations.

How does the world's greatest detective fare in the theater? The results are always shocking, but never disappointing.

Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Legacy

The year is 1898. Doctor Watson is once more in Lyme Regis to visit the lady in his life, Mrs. Beatrice Heidler. A gruesome death with echoes of one of Sherlock Holmes previous cases brings Holmes himself down to Dorset. In the company of an old friend, they encounter an old enemy with vengeance on his mind. A tale of revenge, violent deaths, and plum puddings.

All our print books are on our site and you can see all our audiobooks through this audible link...(MX Audio on Audible).

2. Audio App

The MX Audio Collection continues to grow and confirmed interviews with Lee Child, Nicholas Meyer, Nancy Springer, Bonnie MacBird and Scott and Burt from IHOSE.

We have a Spring offer on the app (20% off) which you can read here - Audio App Adds more stories - there is also a $2 two day trial.

3. New Books

As many of you will know, one of the benefits of subscribing to our newsletter is to know about, and get access to, new Sherlock Holmes books months ahead of the public. Here are some great new books you can grab now whilst others wait.....

Sherlock Holmes - A Study in Illustrations - Volume 2 (20th March)

Fans loved Mike's first collection of illustrations, even though the first book was dominated by Sidney Paget. The second volume is even larger at 456 pages and over 400 images. The books are very large casebound hardcovers.

The Undiscovered Archives of Sherlock Holmes (24th March)

The author of these “history mysteries” is John Lawrence, a University of California-trained history Ph.D. who spent nearly 40 years as a top staff person in the U.S. House of Representatives, the last 8 as chief of staff to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The author uses his professional training to blend historical fact with Holmesian embellishments that produce unique stories any devotee of The Canon will enjoy. These are all traditional-style pastiches published in various anthologies from 2015 – 2020, including the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories.

Sherlock Cat and The Missing Mousie (31st March)

We've been itching to make this gorgeous book available and here it finally is. Written and illustrated by friends Heather and Amanda this is a brilliant book for young children. It's also featuring in a Kickstarter this week.... (click here)

“From now on, I am going to be Sherlock Holmes, the World’s Greatest Cat Detective.” With those words, my friend Spot decided he would become a crime-solving kitty.

“And you, of course,” he said dramatically. “Will be my faithful friend, Dr. John Watson. The one who writes down all of my adventures and shares them with the world! We’ll be famous! Everyone will know the name ‘Sherlock Holmes, The World’s Greatest Cat Detective!’” 

“Mm hmm,” I agreed. I wasn’t too worried. I was sure that, by morning, Spot would have forgotten all about becoming Sherlock Holmes. Boy, oh boy, was I wrong.

The Uncollected Cases of Sherlock Holmes (7th April)

The Uncollected Cases of Sherlock Holmes presents eight new stories about Holmes which set the great detective against the background of Victorian England, an era of enormous progress, in science, transport, and medicine but which also witnessed a surge in urban poverty, prostitution and imperial adventurism. Each of the stories in this collection engages with an aspect of this background. In ‘The Sicilian Defence’, Holmes comes to the aid of a disgraced army veteran who has fallen in love with a Sudanese woman and incurred the wrath of her father, whilst in ‘The Archaeopterx’ Holmes has to recover an important fossil which has been stolen from the Natural History Museum. In ‘The Missing Heir’ Holmes is asked to find the heir to a great fortune, considered by his family to be mentally unstable, and in ‘The Dunwich Ghost’ he investigates the plight of an old army colleague of Watson’s who is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife.

The Holmes who emerges from these stories justifies the description of him by Watson as the ‘best and wisest of men.’ Whether investigating a gang of forgers, securing justice for a murdered prostitute or facing a Russian spy we see his ferocious intelligence alongside a strong humanitarian bias. Despite his idiosyncracies, his solitary temperament, his melancholia and addiction to cocaine, he is both a man of his time and a man for our time.

The author of this volume is Geoffrey Finch, an Associate Lecturer in English Language at the Open University. Geoffrey has taught at Universities in Africa, New Zealand and the UK. He lives in Greater London with his wife and their cat, Humphrey, who makes a guest appearance in the fifth story, ‘The Cathedral Cat’.

New Cases of Sherlock Holmes (14th April)

An unidentified woman is found dead with a set of false teeth mysteriously gripped in her hand. A young tutor finds himself accused of a bizarre art theft. A Russian refugee in hiding is helped by Watson’s wife Mary, and now Mary has disappeared.

In these ten stories, Shaw reveals to us a mercurial and complex Holmes, a conflicted Watson, and a relationship between the two that is nuanced and psychologically rich. Here is a Sherlock Holmes you will welcome: true to form yet renewed; by turns infuriating and charming.

Shaw suggests issues that resonate with a contemporary reader while deftly avoiding piety. In this debut collection, you will discover wry humour, Victorian pathos and of course, hansom cabs in a London fog.

The Additional Investigations of Sherlock Holmes (21st April)

One look at Arthur Hall's profile on this site (click here) and you'll see that Arthur Hall is one of the most prolific Holmes writers of the last decade with six novels (a seventh coming soon) and several short story collections. This book contains seven more of his short stories.

The Redacted Sherlock Holmes Volume VII

 Two kings, a model, a traitor, two wombats, two poets, an accountant, more lobbyists than you can count, three titans of business, two artists, a pawnbroker…and Sherlock Holmes. 

Orlando Pearson presents them all in the latest addition to the acclaimed Redacted Sherlock Holmes series.

• The Poet and his Muse – a life-changing discovery in Highgate Cemetery;
• A Study in Black and Orange – the race to find a missing royal artefact;
• The Cherry-Tree and the Comma – poetry, treason, and blackmail;
• M Harris Smith – the woman with whom Holmes had a professional association; and
• A Story with a Health-Warning – death, spirits, and taxes.

An irresistible blend of Holmestry and history.

Mrs. Hudson and The Wild West (15th May)

When Buffalo Bill Cody's horse is stolen, the star of the world's foremost wild west show travels to Baker Street to consult the star of the world's foremost consulting detective agency. Like the many before him, Colonel Cody takes Sherlock Holmes to be that star. The true sage of 221B Baker Street, who also serves as its landlady, takes control of the situation, and finds both the purloined animal and the two children who had taken the horse for a joy ride 1903 style. When their father is murdered weeks later, the children fear they will be blamed because of their quarrel with him. They run away to join the wild west show leading Colonel Cody to make a return visit to Baker Street—this time with the two children in tow, and to enlist Holmes in the search for a murderer.

Mrs. Hudson, will, of course, once again take charge, once again without acknowledgement of her contribution, once again maintaining the fiction of Sherlock Holmes's leadership, an essential pretense in the male dominated world of Victorian England. As Mrs. Hudson and her colleagues work to discover the murderer, they will find themselves having to counter an anti-Indian bigotry that places at risk the marriage of friends of Mrs. Hudson's from the wild west show, and Mrs. Hudson's very life. With the help of her two young horse thieves, now happily rehabilitated, Mrs. Hudson may yet find the way to a just and rewarding outcome.

An Irregular Life (19th May)

“And now comes a man who thinks like, looks like, talks like and is as close to the real Conan Doyle as possible. He is Mark McPherson.”  John Bennett Shaw

But on his own account, since childhood Mark McPherson's interest in the worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle and his Great Detective have become a realized dimension of his life. A professed student of the mysterious and arcane who turned his love toward investigation, he would eventually create the DAEDALOS Investigative Agency and address a host of the world's greatest literary, historical, paranormal, and criminal enigmas. Called "a real life Sherlock Holmes" and "Michigan's Indiana Jones,"

McPherson's explorations have involved the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster, the probing of sacred sites of Egypt's Giza Plateau and a methodical pursuit of the Shakespeare Authorship Mystery. He has also examined the enigma of the Shroud of Turin, conducted The Final Houdini Séance and sponsored an underwater hunt for Atlantis and numerous archaeological expeditions in Britain in quest of the mytho-historical Arthurian legends. Reflecting his enduring interest in the subject of Sherlock Holmes, Mark McPherson sought and found the Dartmoor location of the "true Baskerville Hall" in conjunction with the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and in 1979 consulted with Scotland Yard in the unparalleled manhunt for the "Yorkshire Ripper." He was the first to present a commemorative plaque at the legendary site of "221B, Baker Street" in London in 1978. Nine years later he would confer with his friends Dame Jean Conan Doyle and Richard Lancelyn Green to create a dramatic "Evening With Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," followed by a decade-long series of critically acclaimed performances throughout America, Britain and Canada.

As a popular lecturer, journalist, author, actor, playwright, film-maker and historical detective, Mark McPherson's personal adventures have garnered him many distinctions, not the least of them being his honorific investiture as "Cecil Barker" for the Baker Street Irregulars. A member of the Amateur Mendicants and Old Soldiers of Baker Street, he was founder of the Napoleons of Crime of Detroit. He has also received numerous accolades from the Arthur Conan Doyle Society and a host of international scion organizations. Currently residing at "Gray Gables," a 169-year-old riverfront manse on the island of Grosse Ile, Michigan, Mark McPherson currently shares his reputedly haunted residence with his wife Dori and his ever-faithful "canine Watson," Bradbury. By his own Profession, An Irregular Life is "the first and last of my memoirs."

The Death of Sherlock Holmes (29th May)

The previous diaries of Arthur Conan Doyle tell of the shadowy real life Sherlock Holmes, a medical school dropout. While in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Bell, a brilliant Edinburgh surgeon, Holmes learned anatomy, surgery, observation and deduction. These skills and his ability to solve crimes led to his recruitment by the British secret service. In this the last of three diaries, Doyle recounts a series of murders and the pursuit of a sinister Russian assassin from Edinburgh to the Yosemite Valley in California. When the case, involving a California millionaire and Chinese tongs becomes desperate, the British secret service sent Sherlock Holmes. The case ended in his death but the great detective lives on in the novels by Arthur Conan Doyle.     

The Experience Club: The Rediscovered Cases of Sherlock Holmes Book 7 (5th June)

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are visited by Mr Josiah Endicott, an injured enquiry agent who believes that three recent murders are connected.

He explains that he was attacked shortly after interviewing a friend of one of the victims and warned to discontinue his investigation. A remark of one of his assailants appeared to confirm that the murders were committed with a common motive and, as his client is clearly unable to proceed, Holmes agrees to assume the case.

Sherlock Holmes and The Crystal Palace Murder (12th June)

Why Meiringen?

Sherlock Holmes readers have always asked, why did Holmes go to Meiringen? And did Moriarty follow him there? And if Holmes did not die in the Falls, what happened next? The familiar stories tell us little. For the first time this book gives us the answers we always wanted. Johanna Rieke’s careful and detailed research, and understanding of the region, show what really happened, and how Holmes escaped, to reappear three years later in London. If Moriarty is now dead, however, his evil work goes on. In London, Holmes and Watson, drawn into an apparently meaningless murder in the Crystal Palace in South London, , soon recognise that much more is at stake. How are a greengrocer’s shop, a dockyard pub in East London, a tattooed seaman and a mysterious German all involved, and who is Moriarty’s shadowy successor? Only Holmes and Watson, in a desperate search and by sharp deduction, can hope, at the last moment, to foil a disaster. Can they prevent many innocent deaths, and protect Britain’s standing in the world? Even as the story ends, they know that their fight against evil will go on, and that Moriarty’s successors are always alert, a constant threat. As this exciting book makes clear, Holmes’ task never ends.

The fifth novel to be translated from the original German from Johanna Rieke.

The Lost World Re-Imagined (16th June)

THE LOST WORLD RE-IMAGINED: In this volume, the original and unabridged text of The Lost World is accompanied by sixty-five charming colour photographic illustrations featuring custom designed models built using only LEGO® brand minifigures and bricks. This uniquely illustrated edition is sure to delight LEGO enthusiasts, as well as fans of the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, children and adults alike. Part of the Re-Imagined Series which includes over a dozen Sherlock Holmes adventures.