Daniel D. Victor Boeken

Romance blooms at Phillips Junior High when teacher Art Malamud, the school's union rep, meets Mandy Sayer, the newest member of the faculty. As the school year progresses, Art leads his colleagues in the historic Los Angeles teachers' strike of 1970 and stokes the ire of the principal, Vivian Laws. Though Art has tenure and relative immunity from Laws's personal attacks, Mandy does not. As a result, she receives an unfair evaluation of her first year's work and even harsher criticism at the start of her second. Mandy's local grievance leads to a major battle with the school district, and the injustice ends up threatening not only her professional life but her future with Art as well.

"A psychological account of a crime" - that's how Fyodor Dostoyevsky described his novel Crime and Punishment, which tells of two horrific axe murders in St. Petersburg. It becomes much more than a mere "account," however, when a pair of dead bodies turn up in London's East End, their heads split open by an axe-blade. To Scotland Yard, the crimes are murders to solve. To Sherlock Holmes, they present an intriguing puzzle. But to the literary man, Dr. John H. Watson, they seem a deliberate re-staging of the brutal murders depicted in Dostoyevsky's narrative. If Watson is right, what can be the purpose behind an actual recreation of the fictional killings? Blocking the answer to that question is a mysterious assortment of English and Russian eccentrics, and one can only wonder if the startling revelation at the end will be dramatic enough to set matters straight.

The eleven stories gathered together in these two volumes share their own common feature.  All have connections to the world of  belles lettres , the world of literature—some to celebrated authors in particular, others to themes or stories associated with specific writers . . . . Let others plumb this collection for more subtle themes.  From Maupassant to Stevenson to Fitzgerald, the authorial giants who populate these pages are explanation enough for its title.  As interesting as such literary associations may be, of course, one can never forget that in the finest tradition of all the other adventures of Sherlock Holmes, these sketches depict a series of heartless criminal acts—some more gruesome than others.

They called her "Lady Stewart" when she was married to a British aristocrat. They called her "Miss Cora "when she ran a brothel in Florida. But she called herself "Mrs. Crane" when she asked Sherlock Holmes to locate her common-law husband, writer Stephen Crane, who'd gone missing in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In their attempt to fulfil the lady's request, Holmes and Watson encounter a world of celebrity authors, terrorist bombings, and haunted manor houses. But it is only when Stephen Crane falls victim to a notorious blackmailer that the master detective and his partner find themselves face-to-face with cold-blooded murder. Under darkened skies, a solitary apparition stood brightly illuminated on the ship's gloomy deck. Or so it seemed. Cloaked in a long white raincoat-the same gleaming duster he'd worn in the face of Spanish gunfire at San Juan Heights - Stephen Crane looked for all the world like the ghost so many people thought he'd already become.

Sherlock Holmes had never met a writer who had ridiculed him as bitterly as Samuel L. Clemens had. For that matter, Holmes had never met a writer who fancied himself a detective. Yet Sam Clemens not only unraveled Holmes investigation into the murder of the hot-blooded woman on Thor Bridge, but also, while writing as Mark Twain, belittled Holmes highly-touted detecting skills. In this recently discovered narrative, Doctor Watson sets the record straight. He reveals other crimes related to the original murder while relating what prompted Clemens in a 1902 short story to deride the famous detective. Spurred on by such criticism, as well as by clues discovered in a classic tale by Bret Harte, Sherlock Holmes begins a new investigation, one that leads Holmes and Watson from the gardens of Windsor Castle to the spires of Oxford University in their efforts to track down a deranged assassin bent on wreaking even more havoc."

This volume contains: The Adventure of the Missing Necklace, The Adventure of the Amateur Emigrant, The Adventure of the Second William Wilson, The Adventure of the Aspen Papers, and For Want of a Sword.

This violume contains; The Adventure of the Smith-Mortimer Succession, Capitol Murder, An Adventure in Darkness, An Adventure in the Mid-Day Sun, The Adventure of the Star-Crossed Lovers, and A Case of Mistaken Identity

When misadventure led a schoolboy in London to employment at Baker Street, few could have guessed where his introduction to Sherlock Holmes would lead. But as the lad matures and he finds himself caught in the middle of a murder investigation, his friendship with Holmes and Watson lures him into the role of detective. "Billy" documents his experiences, and soon his sleuthing skills not only bring him to another murder, but also lay the foundation for his metamorphosis into a famous mystery writer, the novelist the world now knows as Raymond Chander. Cover, page [4].

Sherlock Holmes' desire for a peaceful life in the Sussex countryside is dashed when true-life muckraker and author David Graham Phillips is assassinated. The pleas of his sister draws Holmes and Watson to the far side of the Atlantic, where a web of deceit, violence and intrigue unravels as they embark on one of their most challenging cases.

The light of an open doorway beckons through the mist of a London Particular, one of those smothering fogs for which turn-of-the-century London was famous. But in reality--as Sherlock Holmes soon discovers--though the doorway does indeed offer respite from the fog, it also leads to the gruesome remains of a double-murder. Two corpses, a stolen diamond necklace, a Russian connection, and a dandified American writer who pals around with denizens of the theater--all add up to a murder investigation with international implications. Leave it to Sherlock Holmes who, in a classic assemblage of suspects in a high-tone British men's club, employs his celebrated powers of deduction to reveal the guilty party.