Some readers have commented upon the use, perhaps excessive at time, of footnotes in the new Sherlock Holmes stories which I have been fortunate enough to recently unearth.

I blame three things. The first is my training as a pediatrician and clinical researcher. For every medical manuscript I publish, careful referencing is of the utmost importance. I plainly have been unable to separate this aspect of my life from my work on these Holmes adventures. The second is that I have always appreciated when an author carefully spells out (admittedly, usually in the forms of an author’s afterword) what was true and what was fictional about their stories. Finally, I ‘blame’ Leslie S. Klinger, the editor of the masterwork, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2005-2006). This work, which delves into the vast amount of scholarly work that has gone into Sherlockian studies, is how I read and re-read the Canon of Holmes, and therefore the presence of footnotes has become permanently embedded in my brain as an accepted part of reading a Holmes tale.

I now find that I cannot write without them. However, I did offer to delete them from the manuscript for The Fateful Malady, included in Part 1 of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories: 1881 to 1889. The editor, David Marcum, suggested via email that we leave them in, since they are “sort-of-your thing.” I can only agree!

For those readers who might be distracted by the presence of these footnotes, I have endeavored to publish or re-publish each of these short adventures to contain first an unannotated version, followed by the annotated one, allowing the reader to choose which one they care to peruse. For the larger compilations of tales, such as The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes, I likewise will publish both an annotated and a basic version.