Dear fellow lovers of historical mysteries: It's elementary, my dear reader. What else, after reaching the age of joyful retirement is a refined gentleman to do with his time but write more stories about Sherlock Holmes or the fascinating world of New York City between the wars?
Craig Stephen Copland confesses that he discovered Sherlock Holmes when, some time in the muddled early 1960s he pinched his older brother's copy of the immortal stories and was forever afterward thoroughly hooked. He first visited New York City in the summer of 1963 and was forever afterward thoroughly hooked.
He is very grateful to his high school English teachers at Scarlet Heights Collegiate Institute in Toronto who inculcated in him a love of literature and writing, and even inspired him to be an English major at the University of Toronto. There he was blessed to sit at the feet of both Northrup Frye and Marshall McLuhan, and other great literary professors, who led him to believe that he was called to be a high school English teacher.
It was his good fortune to come to his pecuniary senses, abandon that goal and pursue a varied professional career that took him to over one hundred countries and endless adventures. He considers himself to have been and to continue to be one of the luckiest men on God's good earth.
A few years back he took a step in the direction of Sherlockian studies and joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada--also known as the Toronto Bootmakers. In May of 2014, this esteemed group of scholars announced a contest for the writing of a new Sherlock Holmes mystery. Although he had never tried his hand at fiction before, Craig entered and was pleasantly surprised to be selected as one of the winners. Having enjoyed the experience he decided to write more of the same and went on a mission to write a new Sherlock Holmes mystery novel that was related to and inspired by each of the sixty stories in the original Canon.
Having competed that task—sixty short novels and twenty short stories—in the autumn of2023, he set out on a new quest. He is currently writing a series of mystery/thriller books set in New York City during the era between World Wars One and Two. Each story takes place in a subsequent year. The series began in 1920 and will end in 1941.
While writing these stories, he and his fabulous wife have been living in Toronto, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, New York, Bahrain, Kuala Lumpur and the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. They might settle down when he turns ninety. Or not.
