David Marcum

David Marcum is the American author of the bestselling Papers of Sherlock Holmes Volumes 1 and 2 which have been translated into several languages. His debut Holmes novel, A Quantity of Debt also has received rave reviews. Not to be confused with the corporate coach David Marcum, the author of Simon & Schuster.

David Marcum first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten. Since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologize thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies, and scripts, comics, fan fiction, and unpublished manuscripts.

He has edited nearly fifty Sherlockian-related books and is the author of over eighty Sherlockian pastiches (so far), some published in anthologies and others collected in his books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes — Tangled Skeins. He has edited nearly fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, including the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 30 volumes, with several more in preparation.

"For someone interested in mystery stories, I grew up in a very interesting way. Or possibly the way that I grew up gave me an interest in mysteries," says David Marcum.

His dad was a Special Investigator for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, covering a multi-county area. He had been an MP in the Army during the Korean War, and then he became a Highway Patrolman before becoming a TBI Agent in the late 1960s.

Because David's dad covered several rural counties, his office was at home. There he kept all of the equipment that he’d need, including his fingerprint kit, crime scene investigation tools, blank forms, and evidence-collecting items — and also the files of all his cases, in two ample filing cabinets. He would let David read those files, starting when he was around eight years old.

In addition to letting David read his case files, he would occasionally take him on investigations. He taught his son how to obtain a subject’s fingerprints, and to lift them from an object.

"I’m very glad for this experience growing up, and how some of it helped prepare me for my first career as a federal investigator with an obscure U.S. Agency, now long defunct. Personally, seeing all of these things in real life has really given me an added perspective when reading crime stories — whether it be the Great Detectives like Holmes, Nero Wolfe, et al, or other books that focus more on police procedures," says the author.

David Marcum currently lives in Tennessee with his wife and son.