Thursday, February 11, 2016

A Scarlet Trail of Murder by Craig Stephen Copland

A Reverend Ezekiel Black Western Mystery
Reverend Ezekiel Black Western Mysteries Book 1

“Reverend Ezekiel Black was certainly one very smart man…”
Newly Released!
Available in eBook here!
  
A Reverend Ezekiel Black Western Mystery
Reverend Ezekiel Black Western Mysteries Book 1

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, the twenty-second of October, 1882, in an abandoned house in the West Bottom of Kansas City, just a stone’s throw from the stockyards, a fellow named Jasper Harrison did not wake up. His inability to do was the result of his having had his throat cut sometime during the previous night.

At the same time, in the same location, in the very same house, another fellow, by the name of Eddie Kepler did wake up. Now, it is trying enough to wake up on a Sunday morning after getting drunk on Saturday night in a saloon on the other side of the state line. However, it is downright disconcerting to wake up beside a dead man, who is staring at you with hollow eyes and a very ugly scarlet gash across his throat. Therefore, Eddie staggered out into the blinding daylight and started hollering very loudly for the police. 

I know these things because by noon on that same day, I was kneeling down on the floor beside my new partner, the Reverend Mister Ezekiel Amos Black, and together we were examining the body of Mr. Jasper Harrison.

Three weeks and nearly three thousand miles later, the Rev, as I have become accustomed to calling the Reverend Mister Black, had not only brought the murderer to justice but had helped solve several other murders and some very nasty deeds that stretched back over fifteen years. This story of mine, written so as to be appropriate to all members of your family, about the brainiest and downright strangest preacher and part-time Deputy US Marshal, is going to tell you how that all came about. And I am not going to be at all surprised if, after reading it, you will agree with me that Reverend Ezekiel Black was certainly one very smart man but, my goodness, was he a strange bird.

James Watson, MD. 

Biography
Dear fellow Sherlockians: The first day of every month has been declared, by yours truly, as New Sherlock Day. On that day every month, for one day only, all ebooks in the new Sherlock Holmes Mysteries will go on sale for only 99 cents. Watch for this, and stock up on the series.

Now, about me. it elementary, my dear reader. What else, after fifty years of enjoying the stories of Sherlock Holmes, is a recently retired gentleman to do with his time but write more stories about the world's most beloved detective.

Craig Stephen Copland confesses that he discovered Sherlock Holmes when, sometime in the muddled early 1960s he pinched his older brother's copy of the immortal stories and was forever afterward thoroughly hooked. He is very grateful to his high school English teachers in Toronto who inculcated in him a love of literature and writing, and even inspired him to be an English major at the University of Toronto. There he was blessed to sit at the feet of both Northrup Frye and Marshall McLuhan, and other great literary professors, who led him to believe that he was called to be a high school English teacher.

It was his good fortune to come to his pecuniary senses and abandoned that goal and pursued a varied professional career that took him to over one hundred countries and endless adventures. He considers himself to have been and to continue to be one of the luckiest men on God's good earth.

A few years back he took a step in the direction of Sherlockian studies and joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada--also known as the Toronto Bootmakers. In May of 2014 this esteemed group of scholars announced a contest for the writing of a new Sherlock Holmes mystery. Although he had never tried his hand at fiction before, Craig entered and was pleasantly surprised to be selected as one of the winners. Having enjoyed the experience he decided to write more of the same, and is now on a mission to write a new Sherlock Holmes mystery that is related to and inspired by each of the sixty stories in the original Canon.

He currently lives and writes in Toronto, New York, the Okanagan Valley, and Tokyo, and looks forward to finally settling down when he turns ninety.



No comments:

Milliron Monday: Letters Home Oct 10 1960

          Abbott "Pete" Smith D.V.M.:   June 16, 1938 - February 22, 2010 Virginia Joyann "Jody" Haley Smith: April 2, 1...