Showing results by author "C. Thorne" in All Categories

“Never ignore evidence,” has long been among the most central mottos in the life and career of Victorian England’s greatest detective, and so it is that the claims of a letter-writer from the wildest corner of Wales draws Sherlock Holmes away from London on the day before an impending full moon, to investigate news that during each of the last two months, on nights when the moon shone at its brightest, a horrifying creature, matching descriptions from an ancient legend, has swept down from the rugged Cambrian Mountains to brutally prey upon livestock, and terrify all who dwell ...

Five years after the infamous events of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes again finds Sir Henry Baskerville his client, as the baronet comes to 221B Baker Street with a report of renewed preternatural goings-on at his home on the Devon moors, which, as in the previous case, seems to be connected to yet another long-buried legend within family history, this time concerning the strikingly beautiful first Lady Baskerville two centuries earlier, and the dark and fatal history which surrounded her. Telling of a terrifying menace which appears only in the nighttime, and which seems ...

Allow us to present the novella Death in the Black Forest, the most recent volume in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, where a Medieval castle in the heart of Germany’s fabled Black Forest sounds like the most idyllic spot imaginable, and yet it is to just this locale that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are summoned amid the notoriously cold winter of January 1887, after four young men in domestic service at the castle have been found dead following what are claimed to be bizarre accidents. Two have fallen from the castle battlements, one was found drowned in the dark ...

Leave behind the hectic pressures of the present-day and return for a little while to the era of Queen Victoria's storied reign, as on Boxing Day 1894, one of the most celebrated men in all London, the famed writer Oscar Wilde, pays a call at 221B Baker Street, bringing distressing news of a theft which stands to see the manuscript for a novel he dubs nothing less than his magum opus, released before the world under the name of a dastardly plagiarist. Wilde's plea for aid soon has Sherlock Holmes on the trail of this missing treasure of high literary art, setting himself up against a ...

In The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, previously unknown cases from the great consulting detective's career are rediscovered, each faithfully recorded and narrated by Holmes' friend and colleague, Dr. John H. Watson. We hope you'll come along on these newly released accounts detailing adventures amid amazing, ever-remarkable, and occasionally sordid mysteries that arise on the cobbled streets of London, the deceptively placid English countryside, and in genteel estates behind whose imposing facades dark secrets sometimes lie. Striving for an authentically classic tone to these ...

What promises to be a tranquil evening in the early years of Holmes and Watson’s time at Baker Street is interrupted via a letter sent by a curator at the British Museum, who rather imperiously demands Holmes appear before him that night in the museum’s archives, and lend aid to what he describes as a threat to his honour, and perhaps his very life. Plunging out into the intemperate night, Watson joins Holmes as he enters into the vast after-hours reaches of the world’s largest museum, and there, in the darkness, meets a man whose secret past stands in contrast to the circumstances of...

One year after the puzzling case that would go on to be known as The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street again finds himself confronted by a mystery surrounded by claims of preternatural events, when a young lady becomes caught in a living nightmare which began after her visit to a museum exposed her to the presence of a black marble sculpture of a Renaissance angel, tainted by a long and sinister history. Will this episode of unnatural torment in the heart of London prove the one instance out of an entire career in which cold logic may not triumph, and the diabolical...

When a letter from Salisbury reaches Baker Street one morning in 1887, its writer telling of his fears relating to a matter he will only discuss in person, Holmes is intrigued. Yet when that would-be client turns up dead less than a day before he was to have made the journey up to London, Holmes’ interest in the case becomes, in his words, “a matter of personal honour.” So begins A Slaying in Salisbury, the latest volume in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, a murder mystery in which nearly everyone within an entire town not far from Stonehenge, could be regarded as ...

It is on a gloriously beautiful evening in high summertime when a client comes to Baker Street speaking of his impending marriage to a young woman whom he desperately loves, yet as it soon comes out, this same love has also driven the young man to do something horrifically wrong. The Case of the Bank Robber Bridegroom, must surely rank as one of the more controversial cases Dr. John H. Watson ever recorded concerning his friend, for it was never published in his lifetime, and comes available today, more than a century and a third after it occurred, as the twenty-seventh installment in C. ...

A fourteen-year-old girl with a taste for the legendary and fanciful vanishes without a trace, seemingly into thin air, from her home in a Medieval manor in the Kentish countryside, leaving her parents overcome with concern, amid a household which claims to know nothing of the matter. After two days of frantic searching, including the dragging of nearby waters, and the setting of a famed bloodhound to find the girl’s trail have produced no results whatsoever, the estate’s owner sends an urgent telegram to London, calling on the aid of the most famous detective of his or any era, ...

Dr. Watson’s walk home to 221B Baker Street one afternoon is abruptly delayed as he comes upon the aftermath of the collapse of a building under construction in the heart of London. Rushing in to give aid to any survivors, Watson soon finds that Sherlock Homes has likewise been drawn to the scene, after hearing the cacophonous noise of the disaster as it unfolded. What begins as a straightforward rescue mission soon unfolds into a mystery with a deep darkness at its heart, as shocking facts arise unforeseen in The Riddle of the Three Builders, the fifty-fourth tale in author C. Thorne’s...

Together for the first time with all-new illustrations, are these collected vignettes, the bonus stories which graced the pages of Omnibuses Two, Three, Four, and Five, available now to those who may have had an interest in these little tales, but who did not purchase an entire Omnibus in order to see them. These short reads should nonetheless delight fans new and old of The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. Read along in The Case of Mrs. Hudson’s Insight, as everyone’s favourite London landlady solves a case which had at least momentarily eluded Sherlock Holmes. In The Mystery ...

During an unseasonably warm September, an army captain known to Watson from his own service in Afghanistan, comes to Baker Street telling of being stalked by an assassin from the bizarre cult of “the Demon of the Mountain,” a member of a tribe of utter primitives who held this officer captive through two years of war, inflicting onto him both torments and puzzlingly extravagant honours, until the day this man was able to carry out his improbable escape, and make his way back down the unholy mountain, and return to his comrades in arms. Now back in England after so long a time away, this...

Enter the fog-cloaked past, as Sherlock Holmes undertakes his first case since recovering from an attempt on his life that left him wounded in body and spirit, traveling to the westernmost reaches of Suffolk, where a client from a previous mystery, a retired military man named Colonel Morley, has pleaded for aid in finding his young grandson, who went missing from his bed sometime in the night. Thus do Holmes and Watson venture to a secluded country estate with a long history of hauntings, which members of the staff claim are manifesting once more, centering around the infamous spirit of an...

On a fittingly cold night in the last year of the 19th century, Holmes’ evening is shattered by the intrusion of a Russian diplomat and his entourage, who come bursting into 221B Baker Street, and he soon finds himself pursuing a case of a young lady’s abduction, a crime which must be kept quiet lest its ramifications threaten to take two of the major powers of Europe to the brink of a potentially volatile international crisis. Told not through the pen of Doctor Watson, but from within Holmes’ own mind as the time-sensitive investigation unfolds, The Case of the Russian Ambassador’s...

“What an irony it is that what would turn out to be among my friend Sherlock Holmes’ oddest cases began with a seaside holiday….” So commences the reminiscence of Dr. John H. Watson, as he relates a serpentine tale dubbed “The Haunting of the Jersey Lily,” in which he and Holmes are unexpectedly wrapped up in a mystery that seems to have its beginnings in what the famed client insists was no less than a visitation from a man she knew to be dead. With a scene that shifts from Cornwall, to the north of the nation, and back again to the crowded avenues of Victoria’s London, the ...

A forceful young typist arrives at 221B Baker Street on the first of April, 1886, with the alarming news that her employer, an eccentric old professor for whom she’d worked for just over two months, had suddenly vanished without a trace from his home, and to make matters worse, she has discovered the house occupied by three others whom she has never before met, who claim to have resided in the home for over a year, and to know of no professor ever being in residence there. What is the truth of the matter? Whatever has transpired in the seemingly quite ordinary suburban London home? Find ...

“It is the mystery not the object,” Holmes explains to Watson on the morning he is summoned to find the whereabouts of a missing wedding cake to be served at the reception of one of the most celebrated society events of the season. Heading out at once through the Surrey countryside to the estate of a nearly extinct noble family, Holmes soon finds that sinister undercurrents belie the idyllic setting of what the bride’s mother, the dowager Lady Prudence describes as the happiest day of her daughter’s life.

What begins with a pleasant Saturday evening gathering at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Watson, where Sherlock Holmes relates a solo case undertaken in a graveyard in the English Midlands, gives way on Monday to an ardent plea for Holmes’ help in returning a young kidnapping victim to her terrified parents. The only clue at the investigation’s start is a harsh ransom note in which the brutal abductors vow to send back one of the girl’s fingers should outsiders be brought into the case. Making haste to the home of a learned astronomer and his wife in a rural village east of London, Holmes ...

Imagine the reaction at 221B Baker Street to a grieving widow’s claim that her late husband has fallen victim to murder, not merely once, but a second time, all within the same week! Thus begins this far-reaching novella, the forty-second title within The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. Venture back to 1880s England, as the world’s foremost detective and his faithful chronicler, seek answers to one of the more confusing cases ever brought to their door. What is the truth in the seeming impossibility of a man who can, not once, but twice be struck down by the cruel arm of death...