Mary Russell
Russell’s War
[UPDATE: the UK edition will be out in e-format in October/November, and in print next spring!] I understand that the physical version of Mary Russell’s War and Other Stories should be shipped to bookstores–and from the Poisoned Pen orders room–next week! I’ll be doing a book launch at the Poisoned Pen on October 1–and as an…
Read MoreNaming a not-so-new baby
Hey, friends–I’m in the process of making a new web site with just that things on it that readers have contributed–the art, writing, crossword puzzles, etc that we’ve done in various contests and promos over the years, along with pieces that I’ve done for events and such. So my question for you is: what do we call…
Read MoreBundling Russell & Holmes
There’s a bundle of Russells, waiting to slip into your e-reader or cell phone: It’s probably inevitable that the first book in any series is the biggest seller, even if readers loved it. Confronted with a list of a dozen titles, people tend to skip over numbers two through ten or so, I suppose because…
Read MoreStreet Life of London
Parts of The Murder of Mary Russell take place in 1925, but much of it goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. The Victorian era was a time of brilliant light, spectacular technological development, and enormous social development. For the wealthy. For the rest, it was a time of rotting teeth, foul diseases, hunger, cold, and the…
Read MoreWomen’s dress: 1879 & 1925
A key date in The Murder of Mary Russell is 1879, when Sherlock Holmes and his future landlady meet. The other date is, of course, 1925, when Mary Russell…well. One thing that fascinated me is the difference in clothing between those two periods. Yes, Russell tends to wear her father’s old suits, but she couldn’t…
Read MoreMr Holmes’ London
Out today: The Murder of Mary Russell, in which we meet a young Holmes, and also see a much older version of the Great Detective remembering those far-off days. I hope you enjoy it. Key to The Murder of Mary Russell is the past of Sherlock Holmes, and especially the Victorian city through which he…
Read MoreBecoming Mrs Hudson
The Mrs Hudson we know and love, first in Conan Doyle’s Baker Street and later in Russell’s life, may not be quite the same young woman we meet in The Murder of Mary Russell. (One week from today!) Don’t worry, I don’t intend to say anything about the process of transformation, because that would be…
Read MoreA Young Mr Holmes
Two weeks from today, the newest (and…last?) Russell memoir comes out. Since The Murder of Mary Russell reaches back into the Victorian era for portions of its tale, at a point we’re going to encounter a fairly young Sherlock Holmes. No, I’m not talking Spielberg, here but rather, the apparent undergraduate Dr Watson encounters in…
Read More221 Baker Street
In The Murder of Mary Russell, we learn just how Sherlock Holmes came to inhabit the iconic Baker Street house where he and Dr Watson settled in before the fire with pipes and gasogene,newspapers and experiments, waiting for the knock from below that signaled a client. As Watson writes in A Study in Scarlet: We…
Read More“Marriage” and–which “artist Vernet”?
“The Marriage of Mary Russell” publishes today–yay! In “The Greek Interpreter,” Watson is startled when his flat-mate Sherlock Holmes pulls an unsuspected brother out of his conversational pocket: It was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the…
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