I was born in London and grew up in the rural English counties of Somerset and Dorset, and the British

Crown Dependency of Guernsey. After several years travelling widely, including farming on the slopes of Mt. Kenya and working on the Zambezi River in Central Africa, I emigrated to Canada and the United States. I studied at the Georg-August University (Göttingen) in Germany, and the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with an honours degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key. I'm a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Member of the Society of Authors.

My detective novels include Sherlock Holmes And The Dead Boer At Scotney Castle, Sherlock Holmes And The

Mystery Of Einstein’s Daughter, Sherlock Holmes And The Case of the Bulgarian Codex, my first short story compilation titled 'A Most Diabolical Plot', Sherlock Holmes And The Strange Death of Brigadier-General Delves' (set in the island of my upbringing, Guernsey), and my latest, a second set of short stories titled 'The Torso At Highgate Cemetery and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories'. Clearly I like sending Holmes and Watson off to foreign parts, the more mysterious the better, as with my novel 'Sherlock Holmes And The Nine-Dragon Sigil'. Like my other 'sherlocks' it took me a year to write, of which perhaps four months was doing the research. I think now I could lecture at my old university, UCLA, on the final years of the Ch'ing Dynasty and the terrifying but beguiling Empress Dowager Cixi, the like this world may never see again.

In a previous novel (Sherlock Holmes And The Sword of Osman) I spent a lot of time researching the final years of the Ottoman Empire, with Holmes preventing the assassination of the Sultan at the request of England's famous foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey. In 'the Nine-Dragon Sigil' Sir Edward again asks Holmes to take on an assignment, this time in the fabled Forbidden City in the far-away 'Middle Kingdom'. Holmes and Watson take up the mission with their customary confidence – until they find they are no longer in the familiar landscapes of Edwardian England. Instead, they tumble into the Alice In Wonderland world of The Forbidden City. China at the end of the Ch'ing, as the 20th Century commenced, was a wonderland still hardly known to the outside world, and I found it enthralling to write about.

My recent 'sherlock' is titled 'Sherlock Holmes And The Strange Death of Brigadier-General Delves'. For the first time in my novels I have set it around a murder trial, and decided to have the trial held in the tiny island of Guernsey where, as I mention above, I was largely brought up from the age of eight to sixteen, leaving for the wondrous African country, Kenya after that.

MX Publishing is about to bring out my next book of short stories, 'The Torso At Highgate Cemetery'. For anyone who hasn't visited that famous cemetery in North London (where Karl Marx is buried) I recommend you spend an hour or two there. The extraordinary cemetery could make every one of you decide to take up your quill and start writing Sherlock Holmes stories.

Oh, and I forgot to mention - if any of you read Italian, the famous Il Gallo Mondadori publishing house has translated several of my novels into Italian, for example 'Sherlock Holmes: Il Sigillo Dei Nove Draghi' and 'Sherlock Holmes: Il Caso Della Spada Di Osman', and 'Sherlock Holmes: Il Caso Del Codice Bulgaro'.

Ciaou!