Daniel Stashower Books In Order

The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man

When Harry Houdini is framed and jailed for espionage, Sherlock Holmes vows to clear his name, with the two joining forces to take on blackmailers who have targeted the Prince of Wales. It’s a case that requires all of their skills both mental and physical. Can the daring duo solve what people are calling The Crime of the Century ? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle s timeless creation returns in a new series of handsomely designed detective stories. From the earliest days of Holmes career to his astonishing encounters with Martian invaders, the Further Adventures series encapsulates the most varied and thrilling cases of the worlds greatest detective.

Elephants in the Distance

Paul Galliard is a magician by training and heredity: his father died performing the Bullet Catch, an infamous trick that over the centuries has claimed the lives of more than a dozen magicians. A pragmatist; Paul confines his conjuring to commercials; he shows up often on TV screens, demonstrating the ‘magical’ power of some brand of household cleanser. Then he gets a call. A producer wants to do a show highlighting his father’s old cronies, those grizzled vets of the glory days of TV magic acts. Their top hats are moth eaten, their rabbits have arthritis, but they re desperate for one last shot at the limelight. Paul would like to give it to them these fellows all but raised him. But there’s a catch a Bullet Catch, to be precise. Either Paul does the trick that killed his father, or the show doesn’t go on.

The Beautiful Cigar Girl

A gruesome murder, a stunned city, and Edgar Allan Poe come to life with vivid detail in this shocking true story by award winning author Daniel Stashower On July 28, 1841, the battered body of a young woman was found floating in the Hudson River. It was soon discovered to be the lovely Mary Rogers, a twenty year old cigar salesgirl who had gone missing three days earlier. By nightfall, news of the girl’s death had spread and sent Manhattan into a spasm of horror and outrage. In the months that followed, the gruesome details of the murder pushed American journalism into previously unimagined realms of lurid sensationalism. But despite media pressures, New York City s unregulated and disjointed police force proved unable to mount an effective investigation, and the crime remained unsolved. A year after Mary Rogers was murdered, as public interest in the case began to wane, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case. At the time of the murder, thirty one year old Poe had recently published his groundbreaking detective story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ A year later, however, his fortunes had taken a downward turn. Desperate for success, Poe sent his famous detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the case of a lifetime: to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rog t.’ In The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Edgar Award winning author Daniel Stashower deftly captures the drama and mystery of New York in the mid nineteenth century, illuminating the spellbinding crime that transformed a city. A Featured Alternate selection of Book of the Month Club, Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, Doubleday and Quality Paperback book clubs.

The Ghosts of Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes once declared: This world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply. And when Dr. Mortimer asked if the legend of the Hound of the Baskervilles was not of interest, Holmes said only: To a collector of fairy tales. And yet Conan Doyle, fascinated by psychic phenomena his entire life, and author of many horror and supernatural stories, did give Holmes a few problems of the otherworldly sort, even if they ended in rational explanations. Featuring an all star cast of Doyle devotees that includes Caleb Carr and Daniel Stashower, hosts of Baker Street is the third collection of original mystery stories featuring the literary world’s greatest detective Murder in Baker Street; Murder, My Dear Watson and these stories bring Holmes and Watson up against the supernatural. This latest installment in the New Tales of Sherlock Holmes series edited by Martin H. Greenberg, one of crime fiction’s most awarded editors and anthologists brings the reader more adventures where the ultimate disbelieving detective tackles mysteries with a distinctly strange flavor, featuring crimes and situations that may possibly be not of this world.

Sherlock Holmes in America

Just in time for Sherlock Holmes, the major motion picture starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law: the world’s greatest fictional detective and his famous sidekick Dr. Watson are on their first trip across the Atlantic as they solve crimes all over nineteenth century America from the bustling neighborhoods of New York, Boston, and D.C. to fog shrouded San Francisco. The world s best loved British sleuth faces some of the most cunning criminals America has to offer and meets some of America s most famous figures along the way.

This exciting new anthology features over a dozen original short stories by award winning and prominent writers, each in the extraordinary tradition of Conan Doyle, and each with a unique American twist. Featuring new stories by:

• Edgar Award winner Daniel Stashower
• Edgar Award winner Jon L. Breen
• Shamus Award winner Loren Estleman
• Derringer Award winner Steve Hockensmith
• Anthony Award winner Bill Crider
• And many more!

Teller of Tales

Winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Best Biographical Work, this is ‘an excellent biography of the man who created Sherlock Holmes’ David Walton, The New York Times Book ReviewThis fresh, compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as one of his adventures. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Teller of Tales sets aside many myths and misconceptions to present a vivid portrait of the man behind the leg of Baker Street, with a particular emphasis on the Psychic Crusade that dominated his final years the work that Conan Doyle himself felt to be ‘the most important thing in the world.

The Boy Genius and the Mogul

The world remembers Edison, Ford, and the Wright Brothers. But what about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, an innovation that did as much as any other to shape the twentieth century? That question lies at the heart of The Boy Genius and the Mogul, Daniel Stashower’s captivating chronicle of television’s true inventor, the battle he faced to capitalize on his breakthrough, and the powerful forces that resulted in the collapse of his dreams. The son of a Mormon farmer, Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a single room log cabin on an isolated homestead in Utah. The Farnsworth family farm had no radio, no telephone, and no electricity. Yet, motivated by the stories of scientists and inventors he read about in the science magazines of the day, young Philo set his sights on becoming an inventor. By his early teens, Farnsworth had become an inveterate tinkerer, able to repair broken farm equipment when no one else could. It was inevitable that when he read an article about a new idea for the transmission of pictures by radio waves that he would want to attempt it himself. One day while he was walking through a hay field, Farnsworth took note of the straight, parallel lines of the furrows and envisioned a system of scanning a visual image line by line and transmitting it to a remote screen. He soon sketched a diagram for an early television camera tube. It was 1921 and Farnsworth was only fourteen years old. Farnsworth went on to college to pursue his studies of electrical engineering but was forced to quit after two years due to the death of his father. Even so, he soon managed to persuade a group of California investors to set him up in his own research lab where, in 1927, he produced the first all electronic television image and later patented his invention. While Farnsworth’s invention was a landmark, it was also the beginning of a struggle against an immense corporate power that would consume much of his life. That corporate power was embodied by a legendary media mogul, RCA President and NBC founder David Sarnoff, who claimed that his chief scientist had invented a mechanism for television prior to Farnsworth’s. Thus The Boy Genius and the Mogul were locked in a confrontation over who would control the future of television technology and the vast fortune it represented. Farnsworth was enormously outmatched by the media baron and his army of lawyers and public relations people, and, by the 1940s, Farnsworth would be virtually forgotten as television’s actual inventor, while Sarnoff and his chief scientist would receive the credit. Restoring Farnsworth to his rightful place in history, The Boy Genius and the Mogul presents a vivid portrait of a self taught scientist whose brilliance allowed him to ‘capture light in a bottle.’ A rich and dramatic story of one man’s perseverance and the remarkable events leading up to the launch of television as we know it, The Boy Genius and the Mogul shines new light on a major turning point in American history.

Arthur Conan Doyle

This remarkable annotated collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s previously unpublished private correspondence offers unique insight into one of the world’s most popular authors. For the first time, Conan Doyle emerges from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, revealing a man whose character and exploits rival that of his famous creation. In particular, Conan Doyle’s correspondence with his mother exposes his endless search for fulfillment and success outside the Holmes stories. At age sixteen Conan Doyle began studying medicine at Edinburgh University. Just months shy of graduating, he made the adventurous decision to accept a position as a surgeon on a whaling ship heading to the Arctic. He returned to Edinburgh, graduated, and struggled to establish his own medical practice while simultaneously writing and promoting his stories. He suffered years of disappointment as both doctor and author; yet, to his amazement, just two months after the first Sherlock Holmes short stories, he had garnered such a following that he completely abandoned medicine for literature. As the public clamored endlessly for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle explored other pursuits: He was a doctor during the Boer War, a World War I correspondent, and the foremost spokesman for Spiritualism. As his life changed, Doyle’s correspondence with his mother remained constant. In his letters to ‘the Mam,’ Doyle shares the dismay he felt over the critical reception of his other writing, and as his irritation with the Holmes adventures mounts he announces his desire to kill off the character. She is his confidante and trusted counsel throughout her long life. The editors are known for their expertise and scholarship on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Daniel Stashower is an award winning mystery novelist and author of Teller of Tales, a widely praised biography of Conan Doyle. Jon Lellenberg is the U.S. agent for the Conan Doyle estate and author of The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Charles Foley is the writer’s great nephew and executor of the estate. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters will be a must have collection for readers interested in the author, Sherlock Holmes, and the Victorian era.