SHERLOCK HOLMES: The Adventure of the Deadly Illusion

Sherlock Holmes was born in an eye clinic in 1891.

No patients ever showed up, so, while he sat in the empty clinic, the ophthalmologist—Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle—started writing stories to pay the rent. And the world met and heartedly embraced its first consulting detective.

But despite the success of the original Sherlock Holmes stories (today among the most adapted and published literary works in history), Doyle always felt that they stifled his serious literary work, such as his epic historical fiction, which was being ignored by the public.

I grew up knowing Holmes and Watson only in the likenesses of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in their classic 24-film wartime collection.

Years later, someone invited me to a pub in Dallas to attend a weekly meeting of a group called The Hounds of the Internet. And 19th century London threw open its doors to me.

I discovered Doyle’s canon of 56 novels and 4 short stories, bought them the same day and consumed them. It was only a matter of time before I added my own pastiche to countless others.

The Adventure of the Deadly Illusion took ten months to research and two months to write.

221b Baker Street, London, England.

The research included everything from an 1872 London street map and a thick volume detailing the history and inmates of the notorious Newgate Prison system to books and posters that took me backstage and enabled me to browse the illusions of the Egyptian Hall. It led me to London and then up to Oxford University, to the library at Christ Church college, the home of the real Rev. Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, author of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

And all of it was fleshed out in murderers and magicians, royalty and rogues.

I never had so much fun!