Martin Greenberg: Sherlock Holmes In America

Then there is the romance of this very city. On the first day of arrival I inquired for the highest building, and I ascended it in an elevator-at least they assured me it was an elevator. I thought at first that I had wandered into the dynamite gun. If a man can look down from that point upon the noble bridge, upon the two rivers crowded with shipping, and upon the magnificent city with its thousand evidences of energy and prosperity, and can afterward find nothing better than a sneer to carry back with him across the ocean, he ought to consult a doctor. His heart must be too hard or his head too soft.

And no less wonderful to me are those Western cities which, without any period of development, seem to spring straight into a full growth of every modern convenience, but where, even among the rush of cable cars and the ringing of telephone bells, one seems still to catch the echoes of the woodsman’s axe and of the scout’s rifle.

These things are the romance of America, the romance of change, of contrast, of danger met and difficulty overcome, and let me say that we, your kinsmen, upon the other side, exult in your success and in your prosperity, and it is those who know British feeling-true British feeling-best, who will best understand how true are my words. I hope you don’t think I say this or that I express my admiration for your country merely because I am addressing an American audience. Those who know me better on the other side will exonerate me from so unworthy a motive.

Martin H. Greenberg is the CEP of Tekno Books and its predecessor companies, now the largest book developer of commercial fiction and nonfiction in the world, with over two thousand published books that have been translated into thirty-three languages. He is the recipient of an unprecedented three Lifetime Achievement awards in the Science Fiction, Mystery, and Supernatural Horror genres-the Milford Award in Science Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award in Horror, and the Ellery Queen Award in Mystery-the only person in publishing history to have received all three awards.

Jon Lellenberg has coedited over half a dozen anthologies of new Sherlock Holmes stories by mystery writers, and with coeditor Daniel Stashower also produced 2007’s Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters , an award-winning collection of the correspondence of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Lellenberg is a member of the Mystery Writers of America; the historian of the Baker Street Irregulars, America’s foremost Sherlock Holmes club founded in 1934; and the U.S. representative of the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Daniel Stashower has produced a number of Sherlockian anthologies and other projects with coeditor Jon Lellenberg, including the award-winning Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters . Stashower is also the author of the Conan Doyle biography Teller of Tales . He is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and lives in Washington, D.C.

[1]Edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley (New York: Penguin Press, 2007).

[2]See the author’s Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1984).