Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes: Repeat Business - Lyn McConchie - Страница 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who gave us the original characters and tales. I loved them when I first read them at sixteen, and many years later my delight in rereading them regularly is no less.

And where the initial idea for a book or story comes from can often be a mystery in itself for an author. There is no mystery about this book. In 2004 Rinehart Potts sent me a newsletter, The Sherlockian Times. In that publication Caralyn Senter suggested that they might edit a theme anthology, that theme being a continuation of the stories of some of the major characters from the original tales.

Some years after that when I re-read the magazine the idea apparently struck my subconscious like a sledgehammer and I found myself sitting down to write a collection of such works. This evolved into Repeat Business in which I have taken the history of the characters further adding in my own idea that, to quote Doctor Watson in “A Girl Gone”—

“I have often observed the two advantages that my friend Holmes has over most other private detectives and also the police. One is that it is very rare for him to fail, and the other springs from that. In short, his clients tend to recommend him vigorously to others, and, if they have a new problem themselves, it is to Holmes their mind automatically turns for aid again.”

Caralyn and her husband, Joel, have been both kind and generous in their permission to use her idea as a starting point and I acknowledge this with considerable gratitude.

Thanks to Gary Lovisi and John Gregory Betancourt for permission to reprint “The Fury” and “The Button-Box,” which were originally published in The Great Detective: His Further Adventures, edited by Gary Lovisi (Borgo Press, 2012). The remaining stories in Repeat Business are published here for the first time.