Mind the Gap!

Sherlock Holmes has hunted terrifying creatures before, but this time the monster has come to him, in a new story set in the area around his retirement cottage on the Sussex Downs.

The Beast of Birling Gap is my latest contribution to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. Since 2015, this record-breaking collection has been raising money to support the school at Undershaw, former home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Birling Gap is a spectacular part of the south coast of England, where the chalk cliff edge is rapidly eroding. I know the area well, but one of the challenges in writing this story was imagining what it would have been like there over a century ago. Many of the buildings that stood near the cliff at that time have long since been lost to the sea.

Evidence suggests that Sherlock Holmes’s retired to a cottage just north of the Gap, in the village of East Dean, and this is my second case set in the vicinity of his new home (after The Midnight Mass Murders). The idea of ‘retirement’ would seem anathema to a man who once claimed to “abhor the dull routine of existence.” The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and it is a pleasure to explore some of the cases that he found to occupy his mind and fill his time after leaving Baker Street.

The Beast of Birling Gap appears in Part XLV of The MX Collection of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, the third of three new volumes of this massive collection of traditional Sherlock Holmes pastiches, edited by David Marcum. As with previous volumes, all royalties will go to support the Undershaw school for special needs children, based in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former home. They are available to pre-order now through Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mxpublishing/the-mx-book-of-new-sherlock-holmes-stories-xliii-to-xlv/.