GG Authors 5 Sherlockian Questions - Kim Newman

Kim Newman
Story: The Red Planet League

1) When did you first encounter Sherlock Holmes?

Probably first in some comedy sketch program on UK TV in the late 1960s - maybe Peter Cushing on the Morecambe and Wise Show, just possibly a forgotten Welsh comedy team called Ryan and Ronnie who did a knockabout serial with Holmes and Watson versus Dracula. My copy of the Complete Short Stories was given to me for Christmas in 1971 by my grandmother. I also have early memories of a radio Hound of the Baskervilles with Carleton Hobbs. I think the first Holmes film I saw was the Hammer Hound, on TV in the early '70s, but I remember seeing the posters for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes up on the London underground during its first release.

2) Do you have a favourite story from the canon?

Not really.

3) Are you active in any Sherlockian societies?

No

4) Are you involved with any other Sherlock Holmes projects?

I seem to have three or four loosely-related series of stories that relate to the subject - the story in this book fits in with a series I've been doing about Professor Moriarty ('A Shambles in Belgravia', 'A Volume in Vermillion' - with 'The Hound of the d'Urbervilles' due next); Irene Adler was in the first of a series of stories ('Angels of Music') about the Phantom of the Opera in J-M Lofficier's Gentlemen of the Night books; and the Diogenes Club, Mycroft Holmes and others appear in the Anno Dracula novels and, in a slightly different way, the stories collected in The Man From the Diogenes Club and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club. To date, the only time I've actually written Holmes himself has been in a chapter ('The Private Files of Mycroft Holmes') I deleted for structural reasons from my novel The Bloody Red Baron (it's appeared a few times since).

5) Any other of your projects you’d like to tell our readers about?

I've just finished a science fiction play for BBC Radio ('Cry-Babies'), and am working on a couple of book notions in fiction and non-fiction. I'm also fiddling with some film projects. Eventually, I'd like to glue the Moriarty series into a book.