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

It is a warm summer Saturday at 221B Baker Street, and Dr. Watson has very little planned for himself after a long week tending to the expanding list of patients his medical practice has brought to him, when a messenger comes dashing to the door and upends his plans, setting him and the great Sherlock Holmes off to the headquarters of the British Zoologia Society, an august and exclusive club for explorers and collectors, whose stated intention is the expansion of human knowledge in the fields of natural sciences. According to the letter delivered expressly into Holmes’ hands, a matter of...

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...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

A visitor to Baker Street comes amid the rains of March in 1889, speaking of the shadowy world of séances and mediumship, subjects about which the ever-rational Holmes has little patience, nor is he any more approving when an accusation is made concerning his role in a past case that saw a convicted murderer hanged, yet when events unfold to draw Holmes to a manor in Wiltshire where the British Séance Society makes its headquarters, he soon finds himself caught up in a case that appears to Watson to have the involvement of the paranormal as its most likely explanation. It’s all inside ...

“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 ...

Come along as two legends of the Victorian era meet, in The Adventure of the Artful Dodger! As newlywed-to-be Dr. John Watson counts down the remaining fortnight until his wedding to Miss Mary Morstan, Baker Street plays host to a man Holmes admiringly dubs “criminal royalty,” the one-time Artful Dodger, himself. Now well-beyond his long-ago past as a master pickpocket, and known simply as Jack Dawkins, the Dodger comes bearing a warning that a new danger has arisen to the youth of the East End, as the most insidious leader of a gang of child thieves since Fagin himself has taken to ...

A three AM knock at the door of 221B Baker Street, soon sends Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson out into the blanketing fog of a cold London night, where they are led by Inspector McPherson of Scotland Yard to an empty building, where four bodies, each the victim of a different manner of foul play, lie discarded like so much refuse. Amid the room the clues Holmes uncovers are strange, even contradictory, and seem to lead to more questions than answers, as he finds himself set about solving a mystery that taxes even the considerable powers of his brain, and leads to a conclusion as horrifying ...

“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 ...

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 ...

An historic necklace tied to a tumultuous love affair between Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb back in the early days of the century, gifted by a starry-eyed suitor to a young American woman visiting London with her family, is audaciously stolen from a posh hôtel suite in broad daylight on a stormy afternoon, and provides the impetus for Sherlock Holmes to respond to the outcry of an angry father, who consults with him at 221B Baker Street, leading the great detective to investigate the circumstances of the necklace’s cruelly well-planned theft. Who has absconded with the glittering ...

Come partake of newly-discovered cases Dr. Watson never dared release in his lifetime…. From the foggy streets of gas-lit London, to a certain Devonshire manor steeped in legend, the eighth omnibus in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes travels across Victorian England to places teeming with mystery and adventure. Inside Omnibus Eight are two previously-published novellas, two short stories, and an exclusive vignette found nowhere else. Included are: The Devil of Baskerville Hall, in which the newly-married Sir Henry Baskerville again consults with Sherlock Holmes, after events ...

Into the parlour of Baker Street one morning in 1883 comes the kind-hearted landlady of a west-London boarding house, bringing Sherlock Holmes a singular tale of one of her residents, whose puzzling disappearance is made all the more incredible by the fact this man, whom all who knew him took for slightly touched in the head, had made the claim that he was in fact from nearly a century in the future. What has become of this odd individual, and what is to be made of his apparently sincere claim that he is a time traveler? Take a journey to 221B Baker Street, and learn the truth in The Man ...

Dr. Watson would call it Sherlock Holmes’ darkest and most haunting case...the evening Baker Street was visited by a young woman who came alone, pleading for aid in saving her father, an innocent man, she claims, from the gallows in a mere seven days, and in so doing, taking the great detective and his faithful chronicler down a twisted pathway to truth. From a gloom-filled murder scene in the heart of the city, to the dismal corridors of Reading Gaol, and into the complex and often-cold mind of Sherlock Holmes himself, here tragedy and hope collide in the swirling London fog of long ago.

Confronted with a development he’d long dreamt of, a weak link in the iron-hard chain of Professor Moriarty’s criminal empire, Sherlock Holmes undertakes a series of quests which arise from clues left in a number of locations around London, each message leading onto the next, and in order to keep a prearranged meeting with the mysterious informant who has sent the challenge, the great detective must unravel a complex series of psychological puzzles before he can keep his rendezvous with the unnamed defector. It’s all in The Case of Moriarty’s Betrayer, the twelfth volume in The ...

A severely mutilated body left beside the river near a bucolic village becomes the starting point for one of Sherlock Holmes’ most bizarre and disturbing cases, as the world’s foremost consulting detective departs from London to begin an investigation, that soon delves into what truly lies below the surface of idyllic country life, and uncovers a violation of one of mankind’s deepest and oldest taboos, in The Eaters of Men, the forty-fifth tale in C. Thorne’s The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes!

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 ...

Literature as fast as arrows! Whether you call them flash-fiction, micro-stories, or something else entirely, they’re tales that zip along from start to finish in almost the blink of an eye. In Flash Fiction: Micro-Stories, the offerings all have either: 10 words 25 words Or 50 words But no more! Read them in seconds, remember them through a lifetime! These more than 700 stories from many genres, tell tales of past, present, future, some comforting, some shocking, a few downright maddening, but whether you have thirty-seconds to invest in reading, or limitless hours, we think you’ll ...

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...