Sherlockian Author Profile - David Marcum
David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts.
He has edited nearly fifty Sherlockian-related books, and is the author of over eigthty Sherlockian pastiches (so far), some published in anthologies and others collected in his own books, "The Papers of Sherlock Holmes", "Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt", and "Sherlock Holmes - Tangled Skeins". He has edited nearly fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, including the ongoing series "The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories", which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 30 volumes, with several more in preparation.
He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth's Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, "The Papers of Solar Pons", and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke.
He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, "A Seventeen Step Program", addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at 17 Step Program
77 of his pastiches have been brought together in the 'Collected Papers of Sherlock Holmes' across five volumes. More are coming as David has just completed his 88th pastiche.
Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat from autumn to spring, and often summer as well. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!
