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“...The story winds through the poetry, to Baskerville Hall, to a confrontation on the moors with a beast like none they had seen, to the inquest on Will Abernathy, (which enrages Holmes,) back to 221B, and thus to the Sussex Downs where Holmes trains as a apiarist and solves a crime, and back to Baker Street for the shock ending I didn’t see coming! The story is really good and the Herculean effort it must have been to write it all in verse—well, my hat is off to you, Mr. Allan Mitchell! I wouldn’t dream of seeing such work get...

An extract from 'The Adventure of the Wordy Companion: An A-Z guide to Sherlockian Phraseology' by Nicko Vaughan Here are just five of the 'C's referenced in Nicko's Wordy Companion: Capricious - somebody who is given to sudden changes in mood with no given reason. In The Adventure of Black Peter, it is how Watson describes the changes in behaviour of Holmes from client to client in regards to his attitude to monetary compensation.  “So unworldly was he—or so capricious—that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he...

"This is the fourth – and final – of Ms. Croyle’s “Before Watson” novels, narrated by Poppy Stamford. The previous books include “When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled”, “The Bird and the Buddha”, and “The Case of the Swan in the Fog”. These four books tell how Poppy, almost the fiancé of Victor Trevor and sister of the Stamford who introduces Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson, initially meets Holmes in 1874, and how she falls in love with him. The books cover the years 1874-1880, as Poppy settles into a Watsonian-like relationship with Holmes, assisting him with some of...

  A range of Sherlock Holmes Tartan is available from MX Publishing.  

"With this “fourth and final” instalment, A.S. Croyle brings to a close her saga of the brief romance, and longer detective partnership, of the youthful Sherlock Holmes and Dr. “Poppy” Stamford, a brilliant, assertive, but vulnerable young women seeking entry into the exclusively male, misogynistic world of Victorian medicine. Along the way (as recounted in When the Song of the Angels is Stilled), she met and fell in love with the budding detective, who has often been accounted a notable misogynist in his own right. Ms. Coyle’s achievement was not only to create in Poppy Stamford a convincing “first love”...