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.