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. For over thirty years I’ve been the U.S. representative of the Conan Doyle Estate.
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 Silver Penguin award for the Archival History series.
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 three books about A. Conan Doyle, the most recent Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (2007), co-edited with Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, which was a BBC Book of the Week and won the Mystery Writers of America “best critical work” Edgar Award. I’ve also co-edited seven collections of new Sherlock Holmes stories by mystery writers, most recently Sherlock Holmes in America (2009).
My new book Baker Street Irregular, an historical novel about the 1930s and ’40s BSI, came out as a Mycroft & Moran book from Arkham House Publishers last November. (Please click on novel.) I belong to Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers (and am likely the least significant member of each).
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. I now live in Chicago where my wife is a lawyer, but we spend a great deal of time at our second home in Vermont, and traveling. We have three children and a grandson born September 16th.
Go to the Editor’s Gas-Bag
Out of my own tin dispatch-box: