I’ve been “Rodger Prescott of evil memory” in the BSI since 1974, and its historian since 1989. I belong to The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) of Chicago, The Sons of the Copper Beeches of Philadelphia, and the separate but perhaps more than equal New York club The Five Orange Pips, founded in 1935. I’m a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and the Sherlock Holmes Klubben i Danmark. I’ve been the U.S. representative of the Conan Doyle Estate for nearly thirty-five years.
In 1999 I received the BSI’s Morley-Montgomery Award for the previous year’s best contribution to the Baker Street Journal, an Archival History product entitled “Fantasy and Enter-tainment”: The 1940 BSI Dinner (see Essays). In 2004 I received the BSI’s unique Silver Penguin award for the Archival History series. Some of my favorite non-BSI history Writings About the Writings are also at this website in my electronic tin dispatch-box.
My other publications include articles and reviews in the Baker Street Journal, England’s Sherlock Holmes Journal, the former quarterly Baker Street Miscellanea where I was the Contributing Editor, and the much-missed Armchair Detective. I’ve written or edited five books about A. Conan Doyle, the most recent “Dangerous Work”: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, co-edited with Daniel Stashower, published in 2012 by the British Library and the University of Chicago Press in the UK and North America respectively. Our 2007 book Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters was a BBC Book of the Week and won an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America. I’ve also co-edited seven collections of new Sherlock Holmes stories by mystery writers, most recently Sherlock Holmes in America (2009).
My book Baker Street Irregular, an historical novel about the 1930s and ’40s BSI, came out as a Mycroft & Moran book from Arkham House Publishers in 2010. (Please click on novel.) Its companion volume, Sources and Methods, came out in January 2015. I belong to International Thriller Writers (and am likely its least significant member).
Born and raised in Kansas City, Mo., I’m an alumnus of the University of Southern California’s School of International Relations, the U.S. National War College, and the Senior National Intelligence Course. I spent thirty-five years in Washington D.C., most of them as a Pentagon strategist in the Defense Department. At the time I retired in February 2006, I’d been the director of its Special Operations & Counterterrorism bureau’s Policy & Strategy office the previous four years. (See my Irregular professional biography, with some words about The Bruce-Partington Planners of Washington D.C..) My wife and I moved to Santa Fe, N.M., at the end of 2013. We have three children and two grandchildren.
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