Branching Out into the World of Sherlock Holmes

By Vicki Delany

If there is one thing, I am not, it’s a non-fiction writer.  I like being able to make up things. But it never hurts, does it, to step out of your conform zone now and again.

A couple of years ago I wrote a creative non-fiction story based closely on my grandfather’s letters about his time in the trenches of World War I. That story appeared in an anthology called Engraved: Canadian Stories of World War I from Seraphim Editions.

And now a true non-fiction article by me has just been published in the collection Sherlock Holmes is Like: Sixty Comparisons for an Incomparable Character edited by Christopher Redmond, published by Wildside Press.

The idea behind the collection is to explore the stories and the legend of Sherlock Holmes by comparing him to other well-known characters of fiction and non-fiction.  People as diverse as Dracula, Huckleberry Finn, and Hermione Granger.

My “is like” is Inspector Edmund Reid from the British TV show Ripper Street (the character in which is based on the Insp. Edmund Reid who was involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper).

A very pleasant side effect of writing the Sherlock Holmes bookshop series is that I have been drawn, albeit peripherally, into the world of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockians.  And what fun it is. I’ve always liked the Holmes books and movies and TV shows (some far more than others). But in the last couple of years, I’ve discovered an entire whole world out there of Sherlock stuff . In my books, I make a point that everything sold in the fictional bookshop exists in the real world.  It’s not at all unfeasible to have an entire bookstore dedicated to nothing but Sherlock Holmes.

The people I’ve met in the Sherlockian world have been fun and interesting people. And not at all eccentric, as one might expect. Just great people with a fascinating, and highly intellectual, hobby.

Speaking of The Sherlock Holmes Bookshop,  the fourth book, A Scandal in Scarlet, will be released on November 13.  The third in the series, The Cat of the Baskervilles, came out in trade paperback last week.