Daniel D. Victor Libri

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.

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."

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].

A young inventor--the man whose name appears in the title of Dr. Watson's narrative, "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"--lies dead on the floor of an old house, two bullet holes in his back. To solve the gruesome murder, Sherlock Holmes enlists the aid of William Gillette, the celebrated American actor renown for his portrayal of the famous detective, and Arthur Conan Doyle, conveniently familiar with the world of spiritualism that serves as backdrop to the brutal crime. In a plot replete with foreign spies, young lovers, eerie séances, and an array of the dead inventor's strange mechanical devices, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson press on to discover the identity of Bruce-Partington's cold-blooded killer.

Quarantines, masks, death-terms familiar to anyone who faced the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918. World-wide, it is estimated that the horrifying influenza killed more than 50 million people, significantly more than did the guns of the Great War, which was just then coming to a close. And yet no one has ever heard from Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson concerning their own experiences surviving the terrible virus-until now. In a recently-discovered manuscript, Dr. Watson reveals the secret which for years had kept him silent about the deadly pandemic. Only when he meets the eccentric American novelist Sinclair Lewis is the truth pried free and the story of an ingenious murder revealed.

Sherlock Holmes examines the body of a murdered scrubwoman that lies on the floor of the South Kensington Museum of Art. But it is not a real corpse he looks at, for those remains have been removed by the coroner. The body Holmes studies appears in a drawing of the murder scene precisely rendered by an American art student. The drawing leads Holmes, Dr. Watson, and the artist-a young Frank Norris before he turns his talents to writing- across the English countryside in search of the killer. From the shops in the Strand to the pier at Brighton, from the lions of Trafalgar Square to the coalfields of Lancashire, the trio, along with Inspectors Lestrade and Gregson, find themselves entangled in a tale of gold, greed, and murder.

One moment the lovely young woman was walking through the Battle of Hastings exhibition at the British Museum; the next, she lay dead on the checkered museum floor, a Norman arrow protruding from her breast. Inspector Lestrade believed he had solved the mystery, but almost immediately recognized that Scotland Yard needed the help of Sherlock Holmes. From London to the Lake District, the master detective, along with his colleague Dr. Watson and recently-met American mystery writer, Anna Katharine Green, follows a string of clues that ultimately exposes the intricacies of a tragic love story-a woeful tale whose twists and turns reveal what Watson accurately called "the unhappiest of Holmes's adventures."