Tony Richards's Blog: 21st Century Holmes

"Good news, Watson."
      "What's that, Holmes?"
      "The latest of my exploits in the 21st Century -- Sherlock Holmes and the Scorpion God -- is free on Kindle for the next few days."
       "Kindling, you say?"
       "No, Kindle, my dear fellow. Apparently it can be found on Amazon."
       "Good Lord, Holmes ... I'm not going all the way to South America just to get hold of a book."

The third adventure in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY -- 'The Hidden Shore' --  is the only one that takes place in a fictional location, a small Caribbean island by the name of Santa Augustina.

But it is based on Caribbean islands I have known, both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking ones. And I know it's a cliche, but the Caribbean truly is a paradise. The lush foliage and flowers. The clear sparkling seas and coral reefs. You cannot help but love the place, its music, its food and its wonderfully chilled out lifestyle.

I'd never snorkeled when I first went there, but by the end of that trip I'd done a great deal ... how can you keep your face out of water that has swarms of rainbow-colored fish, puffer fish and even small barracuda? I'd never eaten a goat curry before ... delicious. Never flown on a twenty-seater passenger plane. Never partied at night on a golden beach to the strains of Reggae music. In the Caribbean, you find aspects of yourself you never even realized were there in the first place. Self-discovery is part of the whole deal.

And what does Sherlock Holmes think of all this?  Hailing as he does from Victorian England, he finds it all a little puzzling, to tell the truth.

My new publishers, Endeavour Media, are principally an eBook outfit. And that being the case, they're prone to putting some of their books out at a Special Offer price from time to time.And so it is with my recent book from them, THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.This January, it is available for $1.28, or 99 pence in the UK.

Hope you all had a great time yesterday evening, and Happy 2019!

But New Year's Day can sometimes be a little flat, with most things shut and nothing much to do. And so if you're feeling at a loose end, here's something to keep you briefly amused ... a spooky short story of precisely 100 words:


COMING BACK
She is dead. I loved her, so I’ll bring her back. I’ve found the books, learned the spells, obtained fresh blood. I paint it into patterns on the floor and then prostrate myself.Nothing happens for a while. But then, past midnight, there are footsteps on my path.And suddenly, she’s there. And yet I feel despair the moment that I meet her eyes. She’s nothing but an empty vessel, needs another’s soul to make her fully human once again.She advances slowly. And the kiss she plants upon me sucks me dry.***He is dead. I loved him, so …

Following on from last month's The Astonishing Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty-First Century, there's now some brand-new Holmes fiction available exclusively on Amazon Kindle. A whole new novelette, in fact. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SCORPION GOD is a mystery that unfolds in a foggy and autumnal London eerily reminiscent of the way the city was back in Victorian times.

When a corpse is found in Soho, central London, covered head to foot in scorpion strings, the police turn to Sherlock Holmes. And as the body count begins to rise, the great detective begins to suspect all is not exactly as it seems.

A criminal mind most cunning is at work here ... not Moriarty, but a person bent on horrible revenge. And Holmes tracks him down through the city's fog-bound streets, only to find he has put his own life in mortal peril.

Something to enjoy during the Xmas break, perhaps?

I've been to San Francisco many times. The weather isn't always the best, but who really cares? San Fran is famous for so many things ... its hills, its trolley cars, its bay, its bridge, its waterfront piers, sea lions, liberal attitudes and rainbow parades. Those liberal attitudes can sometimes make a visit decidedly weird: walking through the Haight-Ashbury district -- center of the cultural revolution of the Sixties -- can be like getting all caught up in someone else's rather surreal dream,


But San Francisco was also the home of two of my very favorite writers, crime guru Dashiell Hammett and fantasy master Fritz Leiber, and their city provided them with a good deal of inspiration.

Inspiration is a strange thing, though. It isn't always the most obvious features of a city that provide it. Two things in particular sparked the idea for 'The Vanished,'  fifth adventure in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. One was arguably the worst part of central San Francisco, the section of Market Street at the heart of the Tenderloin district, a considerably less than salubrious area filled with homeless beggars. And yet San Fran's street people are featured largely in this tale.

The second spark? My wife and myself took a ferry over the bay to the town of Sausalito. It's a lovely place, but doesn't appear in the tale. What does appear is the huge cloud of fog -- almost permanently there -- which a ship has to pass through when it's halfway across, a very atmospheric thing to experience and almost ghostly in its way.

But then Sherlock Holmes is more than used to fog, now isn't he?

When I tell people who have never been there that Hong Kong has to be one of my favorite places, well, they tend to look at me askance. What's so great about a place like that? It's just tall skyscrapers and extremely crowded streets. Which is the general perception of what Hong Kong is like, and it isn't totally untrue. The Central district certainly answers that description. But I've been to the city and its surrounding towns and districts twice, for several weeks on each occasion, and can assure you there's a lot more to Hong Kong.

There are older districts, much less busy. You'll find tiny little temples in a couple of them, occupying sometimes just a single room and only reached by climbing up a fire escape. Much larger temples in the city include the Che Kung and the Wong Tai Sin.



The best one to my mind, though, is the 'Poor People's Temple,' the Man Mo on Hollywood Road, crammed full of statues of the Daoist gods and always filled with incense smoke.


But there are places in Hong Kong where you can genuinely chill out and not be jostled for a single moment. Victoria Peak is an obvious spot, reached by the famous Peak Tram. Not only is it peaceful up there but the views are just spectacular ... and rather atmospheric when a mist comes rolling in from the South China Sea.



And nearby to the Peak Tram there's the green and very pleasant Victoria Park, a fine place to relax after a tough day in the city. But the quiet, calm place I love the best is in an altogether surprising location, surrounded by high skyscrapers and by some very busy streets. The Chi Lin nunnery is a place of true tranquility, with a series of temple halls where Buddhist chanting goes on behind screens. There are beautifully-kept gardens and lily-pad filled pools. You'd never believe that you were almost at the heart of one of the most populated cities in the world.


Hong Kong is not just a location of vaulting towers and bustling sidewalks after all. It's one of the most diverse and fascinating places that I've ever been to. And so is it any wonder that I chose to set my seventh Sherlock Holmes adventure -- 'A Shadow in the Harbor' -- in Hong Kong?

When I tell people who have never been there that Hong Kong has to be one of my favorite places, well, they tend to look at me askance. What's so great about a place like that? It's just tall skyscrapers and extremely crowded streets. Which is the general perception of what Hong Kong is like, and it isn't totally untrue. The Central district certainly answers that description. Here's a photo from my second trip, taken in late December (hence the Santa signs in the background of the shot):


But I've been to the city and its surrounding towns and districts twice, for several weeks on each occasion, and can assure you there's a lot more to Hong Kong than simply modern buildings and dense crowds.

There are older districts, much less busy:


You'll find tiny little temples in a couple of them, occupying sometimes just a single room and only reached by climbing up a fire escape. Much larger temples in the city include the Che Kung and the Wong Tai Sin. And there are a good couple dozen of those.



The best one to my mind, though, is the 'Poor People's Temple,' the Man Mo on Hollywood Road, crammed full of statues of the Daoist gods and always filled with incense smoke.


But there are places in Hong Kong where you can genuinely chill out and not be jostled for a single moment. Victoria Peak is an obvious spot, reached by the famous Peak Tram -- in reality a funicular railway.


Not only is it peaceful up there but the views are just spectacular ... and rather atmospheric when a mist comes rolling in from the South China Sea.



And nearby to the Peak Tram there's the green and very pleasant Victoria Park, a fine place to relax after a tough day in the city.


If you don't just want to chill out but actually sprawl out, Hong Kong even has some largely man-made beaches, like this one at Repulse Bay.


There's a Chinese garden at one end of it, full of large plaster statues inspired by the local mythology. A little tacky maybe, but it provides you with some decent photo opportunities. (That's me, leaning on a lion).


But the quiet, calm place I love the best is in an altogether surprising location, surrounded by high skyscrapers and by some very busy streets. The Chi Lin nunnery -- easily reached by the subway system -- is a place of true tranquility, with a series of temple halls where Buddhist chanting goes on behind screens. There are beautifully-kept gardens and lily-pad filled pools. You'd never believe that you were almost at the heart of one of the most populated cities in the world.


Hong Kong is not just a location of huge towers and bustling sidewalks after all. It's one of the most diverse and fascinating places that I've ever been to. And I haven't even properly got started yet. There's plenty more to tell about this former British colony.

But is it any wonder that I chose to set my seventh Sherlock Holmes adventure -- 'A Shadow in the Harbor' -- in Hong Kong?

I can still remember how it felt getting ready for my first trip to Africa. It felt like I was going to Mars. And when I finally got there ... when I stepped out onto the tarmac at night after a long and fairly grueling flight? There it was above me, a pale red quarter-moon, not upright as it is in Europe but tipped onto its side so that it looked like a kayak floating on a sea of bluish-blackness, exactly as described by author Karen Blixen ('Isak Dinesen') in the writings that inspired the movie Out Of Africa.

The next morning, I hired a Land Rover pickup truck and started to explore the place, driving for hours and getting out to take a look at my surroundings whenever the urge took me. And on a couple of occasions, that plan almost got me into trouble. I once stepped down into an area of foot-tall grass, only to notice some of that grass beginning to shift in my direction. I knew I was in mamba country, and I knew those kinds of snakes were highly territorial, not to mention very, very deadly. So I got back into the truck fast. Another time, I stopped at the summit of a mountain pass, wandered off to take some photos - like the one above, for instance - and strolled back to the truck only half a minute before it got surrounded by a truly massive tribe of wild baboons that turned up out of nowhere. Had I left it any longer I'd have had real problems getting in my vehicle and driving home.


But the sheer colossal scale of the place utterly amazed me. I'd never been anywhere before where the landscape stretched off in every direction for literally as far as the eye could see. And then there was the wildlife, of course.

I've written fiction based in Africa before, mostly in my Abel Enetame near-future mysteries. But I had to have the Great Detective visit that Great Continent as well.

In 'The Hunters and the Hunted,' Holmes finds himself the guest of Colonel Harris Masterton, owner of the Gold Valley Safari Lodge, deep in the heart of the African bush. He's been called there because some hunters staying at the lodge have started dying very grisly deaths.

I was careful of one matter, though. At no point in the telling of this new adventure did I let Sherlock Holmes get anywhere near the Victoria Falls. Considering what happened to him the last time that he got near a waterfall, it would probably be better if he avoided such things.

I can still remember how it felt getting ready for my first trip to Africa. It felt like I was going to Mars. And when I finally got there ... when I stepped out onto the tarmac at night after a long and fairly grueling flight? There it was above me, a pale red quarter-moon, not upright as it is in Europe but tipped onto its side so that it looked like a kayak floating on a sea of bluish-blackness, exactly as described by author Karen Blixen ('Isak Dinesen') in the writings that inspired the movie Out Of Africa.

The next morning, I hired a Land Rover one-ton pickup truck and started to explore the place, driving for hours and getting out to take a look at my surroundings whenever the urge took me. And on a couple of occasions, that plan almost got me into trouble. I once stepped down into an area of foot-tall grass, only to notice some of that grass beginning to shift in my direction. I knew I was in mamba country, and I knew those kinds of snakes were highly territorial, not to mention very, very deadly. So I got back into my truck fast. Another time, I stopped at the summit of a mountain pass, wandered off to take some photos - like the one above, for instance - and strolled back to the truck only half a minute before it got surrounded by a truly massive tribe of wild baboons that turned up out of nowhere. Had I left it any longer I'd have had real problems getting in my vehicle and driving home.


But the sheer colossal scale of the place utterly amazed me. I could see why writers like Hemingway fell so heavily in love with it. I'd never been anywhere before where the landscape stretched off in every direction for literally as far as the eye could see. And then there was the wildlife, of course, starting with a small family of zebras that almost walked up to my truck and poked their heads in through my window. But there were rhinos with young, elephants, gazelles, giraffes. No lions I'm afraid, not that first trip; the rainy season had just started, the herds had dispersed from their watering holes, and so the lions were difficult to find. A river trip, though, provided crocodiles and hippos.

I've written fiction based in Africa before, mostly in my Abel Enetame near-future mystery tales which were first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. But I had to have the Great Detective visit that Great Continent as well.

And so in 'The Hunters and the Hunted' - eighth tale in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21st CENTURY - Holmes finds himself the guest of Colonel Harris Masterton, owner of the Gold Valley Safari Lodge, deep in the heart of the African bush. He's been called there because some hunters staying at the lodge have started dying very grisly deaths.

I was careful of one matter, though. At no point in the telling of this new adventure did I let Sherlock Holmes get anywhere near the Victoria Falls. Considering what happened to him the last time that he got near a waterfall, it would probably be better if he avoided such things.