James Lovegrove on ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon’— “My goal [was] to create a proper Holmes story with an overlay of ghostliness.”
“There’s a literary tradition going back to Victorian times of equating Christmas with ghosts.”
A Sherlock Holmes novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Odin. and the Firefly novel Big Damn Hero.
James Lovegrove has written dozens of noteworthy works of fiction, including several Sherlock Holmes novels. These include his trilogy that serves as a crossover between the fictional worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft. His seasonal offering for Holmes is Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon.
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As Lovegrove told BookPage, he drew inspiration from The Hound of Baskervilles.
“It’s the most Gothic and ghostly of all the canonical tales (even though, of course, there’s nothing actually supernatural in it). The mood of the novel and its powerful sense of place—Dartmoor at its bleakest and most forbidding—were what I most hoped to replicate in Christmas Demon.”
It was Lovegrove’s wife who suggested he should try writing something set at Christmas, the author told Risingshadow.
“She gets much more excited about the season than I do. I thought that it would be the perfect opportunity to do a Sherlock Holmes story involving ghosts and other supernatural happenings.”
After all, Lovegrove points out, there’s a literary tradition going back to Victorian times of equating Christmas with ghosts, from Charles Dickens to M.R. James and beyond.
“Something, I reckon, to do with it being the darkest, coldest time of year,” Lovegrove says, “with real shivers to match emotional ones. That was my goal with Christmas Demon: to create a proper Holmes story with an overlay of ghostliness.”
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon
James Lovegrove
Categories: Cozy Culinary Mysteries, Occult Fiction, Historical Mystery
It is 1890, and in the days before Christmas, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson are visited at Baker Street by a new client: Eve Allerthorpe—eldest daughter of a grand but somewhat eccentric Yorkshire-based dynasty—is greatly distressed, as she believes she’s being haunted by a demonic Christmas spirit.
Her late mother told her terrifying tales of the sinister Black Thurrick, and Eve is sure that she has seen the creature from her bedroom window. What is more, she has begun to receive mysterious parcels of birch twigs, the Black Thurrick’s calling card...
Eve stands to inherit a fortune if she is sound in mind, but it seems that something—or someone—is threatening her sanity. Holmes and Watson travel to the Allerthorpe family seat at Fellscar Keep to investigate, but soon discover that there is more to the case than at first appeared.
There is another spirit haunting the family, and when a member of the household is found dead, the companions realize that no one is beyond suspicion…
About the Author
James Lovegrove is the author of more than 60 acclaimed works of fiction, which have sold all over the world and been translated into 16 languages. His works include the Cthulhu Casebooks series, the Pantheon series, and novels set in the world of Firefly.
He has also produced numerous Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books. These include The Stuff Of Nightmares, Gods Of War, The Thinking Engine, The Labyrinth of Death and The Devil’s Dust, along with the Cthulhu Casebooks, a trilogy mashing up the fictional worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft. His latest Holmes offerings are Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon, Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons, a continuation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors.
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