it is a full partnership in the sense of a marriage, but the partnership to them comes first. So the partnership between Holmes and Russell is the key point, and. He takes him seriously as a person, and sort of stands back and looks at how Watson reacts to the world, but the emotional link there is very limited. Watson obviously, but he doesn't take him seriously as mind. Well, I think that the idea of looking at Holmes in a close relationship with anyone is tricky because in the Conan Doyle stories, he and Watson have this somewhat unequal friendship. How difficult is it to write his character within their relationship? To those unfamiliar with the series, they may be shocked that in your book Sherlock Holmes is actually married. So that's been one of the areas that's been interesting. How would he react? How would he change? And I think he would have changed. I thought it was very interesting to look at him confronted by that world, both in the person of Mary Russell and in the broader world. I became more interested in how Holmes, who represents all that is good about the Victorian era, reacts to the huge social changes that went on in Britain after the Great War. That is, if you had a young woman of the 20th century who encountered a similar mind to hers, how would she react? What would she do? So from the beginning, these have been Mary Russell novels rather than Sherlock Holmes pastiches. I was more interested in what that brain would look like in a different person. What is it about Sherlock Holmes that captured your imagination? You were a little ahead of the curve with the recent renewed interest in Sherlock Holmes in pop culture. That's what the book is! So I'm very grateful that I don't have to deal with being a new writer in the 2015.

You must build your social media presence,' which is, I mean, it's sort of sad because what do you do if you're a new writer? You don't have a platform. In fact, I just went to a conference last weekend where all these poor new writers, the first thing they were told by potential agents was, 'You must assemble a platform. to watch how the publishing world has shifted, because when I first started, basically publishers didn't want writers to have anything to do with promotion. How has technology changed the way that you write?Īs far as the sort of broader world of tech, it has been really interesting. Social media wasn't around when the series started, really.

Dreaming spies by laurie r king