Excerpt from THE RED HANDED LEAGUE by Hadley Colt

THE RED-HANDED LEAGUE & THE FACES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The faces of Sherlock Holmes: So many, so varied. Some so bewildering.

I’m specifically thinking about Mr. Holmes’ countless incarnations on film.

When you look over the list of actors who’ve taken on the task of playing Sherlock—and if you’ve somehow evaded forming your own opinions of The Great Detective—then you might believe the character to be wildly elastic.

There’s a vast range between Basil Rathbone and Benedict Cumberbatch; bigger still between Roger Moore (James Bond, The Saint) and Tom Baker (Rasputin…Doctor Who). 

Even the guy who played Max Headroom got several turns as Holmes early during the previous decade.

The old black-and-white Rathbone films simply don’t speak to me. Not a smidge.

Rathbone’s Holmes is rigid, distant, and terribly off-putting to me. 

The Basil-era Watson comes across as a daft old uncle slipping into senility. You can’t fathom the two men actually being able to spend a simple evening together in their Baker Street digs, let alone having a constructive partnership as crime fighters.

Surely, that Watson would drive that Holmes to murder.

Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, it seems to be there was more very bad miscasting: venerable but dull old British actors (Peter Cushing, John Neville) and some bewildering choices including George C. Scott and “I Dream of Jeanie’s” Larry Hagman (it’s true, look it up!).

Things started to improve, at least from my perspective, in the late 1970s, with Nicol Williamson’s haunted take on a cocaine-addicted Great Detective in Nicholas Meyer’s “The Seven-Percent Solution.” 

Soon after came Christopher Plummer’s rather dashing Holmes in the under-rated “Murder by Decree.”

In both those iterations, Watson finally got an I.Q. up-grade courtesy of Robert Duval and James Mason.

In 1984, my definitive Holmes at last arrived in the person of Jeremy Brett. 

Particularly in the early going of his sublime array of Granada adaptations, Brett for me embodies the Holmes that captivated me on the page.

Once Mr. Brett passed, it took over a decade of this new century to give me another Holmes in whom I could invest in and take to my heart in the person of Benedict Cumberbatch.

We all have our favorite or preferred takes on Holmes and Watson.

I know some actually prefer Robert Downey, Jr. and Johnny Lee Miller to Cumberbatch. I don’t get it, but to each his own, right?

When it came time to put my spin on Sherlock Holmes for my new novel, The Red-Handed League, I was aiming for a synthesis of the younger Jeremy Brett and the current Cumberbatch versions of Holmes.

Given the chance, how would you portray Holmes and Watson? Who would you be seeing in your mind’s eye as you tried to restore them to life on the page?

PUBLISH OR PERISH? (THE RED-HANDED LEAGUE DEBUTS)

“I am lost without my Boswell.”

—Sherlock Holmes

The Red-Handed League, my new thriller about Sherlock Holmes, debuts this week.

Hewing to a Doylean naming strategy, this little essay might be called, The Matter of the Murdered Biographer. It could also be titled, The Case of Fearful Symmetry.

Here’s what I mean:

My first work published by Betimes Books was the literary thriller Permanent Fatal Error. It centers on a presumed-dead cult novelist ala J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon whose would-be biographers mysteriously die.

The Red-Handed League is a present-day prequel to Conan Doyle’s first-published Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet.

My new book spins on inappropriate relationships between students and instructors at an upscale private school. It also re-imagines and melds aspects of several noted Holmes tales, including “The Red-Headed League” and “The Master Blackmailer.”

What goes around comes around, they say.

Or as Holmes might observe, “Everything comes in circles. The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.”

There’s a creepy nexus between my first and second books for Betimes, you see.

While we were working on cover designs and last touches for The Red-Handed League, my publisher ran across an article about a man obsessed with writing the definitive biography of a famous author, only to die violently under the most mysterious of circumstances.

The excellent article by David Grann detailing this real-life mystery was published in The New Yorker in December 2004.

“That’s pretty far back in the rearview mirror, Ms. Colt,” you might point out.

And I’d respond, “Yes. Yes, it is.”

And yet?

There is fearful symmetry in this. Deliciously lingering mystery, too.

The Betimes Books publisher and her author were struck by the very strange overlap between the mysterious death of a deceased novelist’s would-be biographer (the set up for an elevator pitch for Permanent Fatal Error) and the fact our second novel together centers on Sherlock Holmes.

You see, the real-life biographer who met his mysterious death in his home surrounded by Holmesian books and collectibles was a revered Sherlock scholar named Richard Lancelyn Green.

His intended biographical subject was (of course) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Apparent cause of death: (Clears throat) Self-garroting with a bit of string and a spoon.

Pray, go off now and read Mr. Grann’s superb piece on this mysterious affair. I’ll wait here, staring out the window, surely brooding, but sans pipe or violin.

***

Welcome back.

Chilling, no?

What was I doing as Christmas crept up in 2004? How did I miss this when it was fresh?

At any rate, like all good 21^st Century armchair detectives, I went straight to Googling this matter to see if any official investigator or real-life Holmes had advanced the ball.

In the intervening twelve or more years, surely someone shed definitive light on what happened to this unfortunate biographer, yes?

But beyond the mystery of the mysterious American voice on the answering machine turning out to be a factory-loaded feature, there’s no more new to report, alas.

Matters stand now as they did in December 2004.

You can believe this was a case of murder, or you can dismiss it as an elaborate suicide staged by a man given to extreme dramatics (very Holmes-like, that last).

Permanent Fatal Error, my thriller about murdered biographers, opens with a quote declaring, “Any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within.”

Maybe too, a biography can shelter mortal risk for the would-be Boswell… Perhaps even the prospect of perishing before publishing.

NOVEL NUMBER TWO COMING: IT'S ELEMENTARY

Hi there...it's been a while.

My second novel is forthcoming from Betimes Books in just a few days. (It can be pre-ordered now, here.)

More on all this, soon, but for now, here's the cover, and the publisher's pitch:

Holmes and Watson.

The centuries-old names continue to thrill crime and mystery lovers around the world. Now the mysterious and bestselling author Hadley Colt breathes sexy new life into the timeless legend of The Great Detective.

We are witness to a young Sherlock Holmes, brilliant, arrogant and at the start of what promises to be a stellar career as the world's first and only consulting detective.

Enter Jona Watson, a fetching young forensics student recruited to go undercover in a tony private school rocked by scandalous affairs between teachers and students. A primary suspect Jona is directed to investigate: the mysterious and slightly odd, newly hired chemistry teacher named Mr. William Sherlock Holmes, a charismatic enigma.

But Ms. Watson also harbours her own wrenching secrets.

Erotic, fast-paced, yet brilliantly true to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic characters, this is a tour-de-force exploration and subtle reinvention of the beloved sleuth.

THE RED-HANDED LEAGUE is a gripping new Sherlock Holmes tale at last revealing the dark and intensely private mystery that secretly shaped and which drives fiction's most famous detective.

THE ANATOMY OF A BOOK TRAILER

In the beginning, there are the words.

Every novelist secretly dreams of a film option, but those are rarely in the cards.

Book trailers are too often a dime-a-dozen.

Rarely, but sometimes, the stars align and you get something like a cinematic treatment—however short it might be in form—of your authentic vision.

I LOVE my book trailer secured for me by my publisher, Betimes Books.

Joose TV and the brilliant Eddie McCaffrey fully delivered a brilliant book trailer for PERMANENT FATAL ERROR.

In the early going, I was asked to provide a kind of script for the thing. What I delivered ran long—more of a cinematic short film than a proper teaser/trailer.

Eddie sculpted that down, picked up an element or two from elsewhere in the book. The result is the perfect set-up of my novel and distillation of its dark themes. We see the mysterious Everett Hyde, author long believed dead, pounding out a wine-stoked warning email to a prying academic.

The music kicks it into overdrive; the noir setting and lighting? Sublime…

Eddie’s available if you wish to explore the option of your own book trailer with him. His official site is here.

For my part, I just sit back and continue to savor his vision of my novel.

Check it out here:

PERMANENT FATAL ERROR ordering information:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

Book Depository

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

WHO IS HADLEY COLT? THE MYSTERY ENDURES...

Throughout July, we continue to offer the chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card to the reader who can penetrate the enigma wrapped in mystery that is Hadley Colt.

In other words, pierce the veil of my penname and correctly identify who the real, already-known author of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR is and win a prize (and literary bragging rights).

Clues have been sprinkled around the Twitter-verse for several weeks now, but the contest to reveal my true identity continues.

Here are your clues:

Guess the famous author Clue 1 What is the common symbol for the Roman God "Mars"? #whoishadleycolt?

Guess the famous author who wrote this Clue 2 Hadley Colt is an Edgar finalist... #whoishadleycolt?

Guess the famous author Clue 3 What is my 1st published work? (Hint: The devil's in the details...) #whoishadleycolt?

Guess the famous author Clue 4 Colt is a name in a novel published under my real byline. #whoishadleycolt?

Guess the famous author who wrote this Clue 5 Do the math: 31313 #whoishadleycolt? #lastcontestclue #PFE

Email your best guesses and contact information to betimesbooks@gmail.com

If there is more than one correct guess, a drawing will be held to determine the winner at the end of July.

The prize is two-fold: A $100 Amazon gift certificate, and a signed copy of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR in its rarest form: autographed by Ms. Colt, and, well, by me…

Happy guessing. Clues will be fair, but authors often have a much harder time hiding behind an assumed prose style, so if you want to go at this the old-fashioned way, you can order PFE here:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

Book Depository

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

CONTEST: WHO IS AUTHOR HADLEY COLT, REALLY?

A bit like Everett Hyde, the central figure of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, its author Hadley Colt is an enigma wrapped in mystery.

There actually is no “Hadley Colt,” of course. That name is a pseudonym for the real me, who has published a number of books under a very different name.

My rational for adopting a penname is explained here.

Having revealed that fact fairly early in the game, it can now be stated it was never intended Hadley’s true identity would be some secret for the ages.

So…

We are officially announcing a contest to rip the mask off Ms. Colt.

Starting Monday and continuing over the course of the week, a daily clue will be posted to Hadley Colt’s official Twitter account @HadleyColt, to @betimesbooks and to Facebook.

Email your best guesses and contact information to betimesbooks@gmail.com

If there is more than one correct guess, a drawing will be held to determine the winner at the end of July.

The prize is two-fold: A $100 Amazon gift certificate, and a signed copy of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR in its rarest form: autographed by Ms. Colt, and, well, by me…

Happy guessing. Clues will be fair, but authors often have a much harder time hiding behind an assumed prose style, so if you want to go at this the old-fashioned way, you can order PFE here:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

Book Depository

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

THE BIG APPLE (BITES?)

Order Permanent Fatal Error here:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

Book Depository

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

So, I’ve got this love/hate thing with New York City.

Put any thoughts of my politics aside as I confess this next: I loved the city under Mayor Giuliani. Post-Rudy, it’s been one big slippery slope into squalor.

Still, there are pockets of the city I love when I come down from my mountain and occasionally venture northeast to NYC.

A lot of my favorite bookstores are gone now, alas.

Time’s Square is just tourist hour all the time on overdrive these days: a blur of light and motion that could send the dead into seizures.

I do have a few favorite places that so far endure, and they’re just off the beaten path of that whole sorry Time’s Square scene.

Got back to the city last month for various reasons; some of it was very wonderful. Made a point of hitting one of my favorite streets for drinking and eating…that made the trip.

The heroine of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR is this young, aspiring novelist named Ashley McKnight.

Confession time: She’s me maybe a few years back.

After a harrowing escape from my current playpen (the Great Smoky Mountains), she makes her way back to the city for a pivotal meeting with her literary agent and a kind of mercenary/author who’s modeled on this gorilla I met at an unfortunate publisher’s party in the city a few moons ago.

The restaurant is this Cuban eatery named Havana Central—it’s got this wicked neon palm tree out front and serves up drinks with these cool swizzle sticks that feature curvy Cuban hotties with windswept hair and hemlines.

The Cuban sandwiches are state-of-the-art and the mojitos the most righteous mixed north of Key West. When I go to NYC, at least one meal happens in that place ’cause I love it so.

Not far from there is an Irish pub named “Connolly’s.” It also features prominently in PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, and not too many pages after Havana Central raises its head. The bartender described in the book is still pulling taps and mixing drinks there, serving them up with a smile and that Galway accent.

BY ANY OTHER NAME

Order Permanent Fatal Error here:

U.S. Kindle Edition

U.S. Trade Paperback

U.K. Kindle Edition

U.K. Trade Paperback

Australian Kindle Edition

Canadian Kindle Edition

What’s in a name?

Everything, of course. For an author, maybe more than everything.

This is not complaining, let’s get clear on that up front: Gaining traction as a fiction writer is no mean feat, and few enough writers ever earn even a small but loyal following of readers.

Thing is, an author’s name becomes a brand, figuratively and literally. Readers tend to be very possessive of their authors, and once they’ve branded them—weighed and labeled them—they are too often loathe to let their branded writer display any pesky maverick tendencies.

The whole point of branding a calf is to establish ownership after all, to categorize them and fence them in. This tends to run against the grain for most creative types.

Chances are, you’ve possibly read one or more of my novels already. They are very different from PERMANENT FATAL ERROR… very different. And that’s the whole point of “Hadley Colt.”

Branding—reader or critical categorization—is too nearly always the cloying killer of creativity. Every once in a while, as a writer, you just want to be given your head and allowed to stretch your creative legs, to maybe run flat-out in some crazy new direction (it’s that whole maverick thing again, don’t you know).

My other novels have traveled far and wide beyond American shores (I’ll assure you of this much, I am U.S. born and bred) and as my bio claims, I have indeed established an international readership. I’m doing okay in that sense, thank you very much.

But I can and do want to write more than just the books that carry my real name. Yet the publishing gatekeepers don’t share my enthusiasm for straying outside the established lines they’ve laid down for me.

It’s that Rowling thing, really—if someone hadn’t outed my Scottish sister and blown her cover all to hell and gone, I think J.K. would be perfectly happy printing her next comparatively low-selling mystery novel to enthusiastic reviews and the delight of a small but devoted band of readers who on their best day would never goose Harry Potter-level Bookscan action for “Robert Galbraith’s” latest. JKR’s wanting to stretch, to erase that damned brand and to shrug off the yoke of reader expectation makes perfect sense to me.

My new novel, PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, is essentially about an author who can’t support the weight of his readers’ expectations and demands, so he simply disappears. Eventually, we learn he’s still writing, only he’s doing it under a different name.

In that sense, I guess I’m a little like Mr. Everett Hyde.

I don’t know if there will be a second novel by Ms. Hadley Colt.

Because there are other stories to tell, stories that aren’t even a little like PERMANENT FATAL ERROR—let alone the many other novels that were printed under my given name—I may yet come under your gaze again, in some other guise, somewhere down the road. It’s that whole “chameleon soul” thing, I suppose. And for me, at least, that’s fun.

It’s a thrill beyond description to see your name on a book, make no mistake about it. I still thrill to my real name on a novel’s cover.

But at some point, you want to protect your story and your ability to tell the tales that tug hardest at your hand. If that means sacrificing identity now and again because The Man just won’t let you go there, well, so be it and let the devil take the hindmost.

Still, I do enjoy a good game, and unlike J.K., I’m not necessarily hell-bent on staying hidden for all time.

So catch me if (and when) you can, my dear reader. Double dare you.

PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, THE BOOK TRAILER!

Here it is, the trailer for PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, my new novel from Betimes Books and available from Amazon.com in eBook format and trade paperback starting Wednesday!

The trailer was directed by the great Eddie McCaffrey and stars Chris Cox. It was produced by Joose. You can learn more about them here.

More about the novel at my publisher's site here.

Bond, James Bond and the PERMANENT FATAL ERROR connection

The tram returning to downtown Gatlinburg.

These pictures are of the alpine tram that connects downtown Gatlinburg to Ober, Gatlinburg—an entertainment and ski complex high atop the Smoky Mountains.

One of my earliest, fondest childhood movie memories is watching an old James Bond movie with my father, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” the first non-Sean Connery 007 film. It was during one of those holiday Bond marathons that seem to come around every Thanksgiving, and I ate it up with all the turkey and pies, etc. The fact we saw it in the Smokys made it even better—but we’ll get to that.

There comes a point when Bond is taken to his arch-enemy Blofeld’s latest remote hideout (the poor, evil man having lost his last one, a spiffy base tucked inside a Japanese volcano in the enticingly titled “You Only Live Twice”!). 

The head of SPECTRE’S latest pad in OHMSS is high atop a piz that can only be arrived at by tram. (Bond escapes back down the mountainside on skis—one of the best scenes in any Bond movie, IMHO, and also a wonderfully-written chapter in Ian Fleming’s original novel.)

To make his escape, Bond first has to travel hand-over-hand down the tram’s cable while it is coming up the other way. He does this in blinding snow flurries and in street clothes, using only the torn-out linings of his pockets to protect his hands from the slick, thick and oily cable that suspends the car. Loss of fingers and hands is a real risk.

Blofeld's Alpine lair in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service."

I get chills (in every sense) every time I watch that movie, and particularly, that scene. The idea of a place so remote that it could only be reached by such a conveyance haunted younger me.

In my novel, PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, I had to have my heroine, Ashley McKnight, travel to my “villain’s” lair in just such a tram, which fortunately exists in my present home in the Smoky Mountains.

When the time comes for Ashley to leave the mountain—and to do so under great threat—she does so by traveling down the Crockett Mountain ski lift, but under less than terrific circumstances…

The lift up Crockett Mountain from downtown Gatlinburg.

AND JUST LIKE THAT, WE HAVE A COVER FOR PERMANENT FATAL ERROR!

PERMANENT FATAL ERROR: Coming soon from Betimes Books

My novel, Permanent Fatal Error, will be published by Betimes Books later this year.

This is the primary place I'll be talking more about all that, posting cover art and videos and such, as the publication date draws nearer.

For now, here's the initial publisher's tease for my novel:

A long-missing novelist, a string of murders and a new brand of heroine fire Permanent Fatal Error, a literary thriller.

Everett Hyde: Cult-writer extraordinaire, once regarded as the voice of his generation; an author in the reclusive tradition of J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon but now presumed dead.

Chase Alger: Award-wining biographer specializing in studies of famous people—writers all—who’ve come to mysterious ends. Chase is a self-made man with his own ambiguous past. When Chase receives an invitation from Everett Hyde’s widow, a disarming offer to write her husband’s sanctioned biography, sinister things begin happening around the would-be biographer.

Chase’s initial replies to Mrs. Hyde’s emails are swiftly returned, marked “Permanent Fatal Error.” Chase senses he’s being watched, his every move shadowed.

Further inquiries after Hyde are first met with stonewalls, then menacing phone calls and emailed death threats.

But the hook is set, and Chase, along with his lover, Ashley, an aspiring young fiction writer, agrees to be taken under extreme security to the remote estate of the mysterious author’s equally reclusive daughter, Shelby Hyde.

As they plumb deeper into Hyde’s twisted personal history, Chase and Ashley are forced to wonder if the famous cult author is truly dead and to ask themselves how much they are prepared to sacrifice in order to disclose Hyde’s story.

Ashley finds herself threatened not just by the cult-author’s mysterious daughter, but also emerging questions regarding Chase’s own murky past.

Permanent Fatal Error is a sexy, Hitchcockian roller-coaster ride from Hadley Colt.