Street 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…

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Women’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…

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Mr 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…

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Mr Holmes introduces himself

  Tomorrow… ** The Murder of Mary Russell can be ordered as:      A signed US hardback from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen Books      An unsigned hardback or ebook from B&N/Nook or Amazon/Kindle      A UK hardback from Waterstones, or hard/ebook from Amazon UK.

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Becoming 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…

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A 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…

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221 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…

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“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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THE GAME for all (US) players

In the spirit of random celebration, let’s raise our glasses (or, screens?) to The Game. Why not? WE may all be looking forward to “Marriage” and Murder (in that order) but honestly, isn’t The Game one of your all-time favorite Mary Russells? It’s one of mine. So Team LRK (ie, me and my blood relations)…

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A Marriage for Mary

A new short story is born! Yes, yes, a short story isn’t a novel, but it’s a bright and amusing bit of new life that wasn’t here last month, and now is, so: yay, me!  (Although “here” is a relative term. It’s here for me. You’ll have to wait until March. Sorry.) Here’s how Random…

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