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...

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...

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 ...

At last these events from 1896 can stand released to the reading public in the 2020s, as Dr. John H. Watson’s account of a case he deemed “too violent and disturbing” to be published in his own lifetime finally appears before the world. In the tellingly entitled The Body in the Safe, Sherlock Holmes takes on an investigation which has its beginnings in a seemingly mundane theft at a commercial archive in north London, where all manner of documents have long been securely stored—until now. As first one cold-blooded murder and then others begin to surface, all connected to 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!

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 ...

Come along into the gas-lit days of long-ago, when Queen Victoria ruled an age named in her honour, and dare to peer into the dark heart of the underworld empire of Professor James Moriarty, a foe whom Sherlock Holmes begrudgingly dubbed “the Napoleon of Crime.” Set across the season of winter—matching the cold soul of Holmes’ greatest foe—witness a daring plot hatched in the brilliant but long-corrupted mind of Professor Moriarty grow to fruition amid the labour of many months in his unseen world of criminal enterprises. Set in London in 1886, this short story diverges from the ...

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...

While in Paris, where he solves a national crisis on behalf of a grateful French government, Sherlock Holmes is approached by a young nun, who brings to his attention the strange mystery surrounding the theft of a precious relic from the convent chapel that very morning. Impressed by the nun’s intelligence and the considerable powers of deduction she demonstrates before him, Holmes agrees to investigate the events at the convent where she resides in the Norman countryside, only to learn that the little religious community is at the heart of larger events than any of the sisters there have...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

“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 ...

Want to hear anecdotes about Sherlock Holmes and his cases—plus his domestic life—that you’ve never heard before, and won’t find anywhere else? Then this is the book for you! It’s been said that Mrs. Hudson plays a significant rôle in daily life at 221B Baker Street, yet what do we really know of her beyond her occasional mention as a peripheral character? In this book we hear Mrs. Hudson in her own unique and intelligent voice, as she tells of cases Dr. Watson never recorded, and details more than fifty recipes from the kitchens of her famous London address, dishes she often set...

Three murders in a single moonless night, each ending in the death of a seemingly unconnected victim, separated by distance and circumstance, united only in the brutally efficient method by which each met their death, and by the fact each had been a passenger on the same Glasgow-to-London train. What conclusions can Sherlock Holmes draw from this confusing set of facts, and will he be able to identify who is behind the crimes, and why he has undertaken so violent a spree of death? Find out in The Case of the Hammer Murders, the forty-seventh mystery in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock ...

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...

“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 ...