Tim Symonds

I was born in London and grew up in the rural English counties of Somerset and Dorset, and the British

Crown Dependency of Guernsey. After several years travelling widely, including farming on the slopes of Mt. Kenya and working on the Zambezi River in Central Africa, I emigrated to Canada and the United States. I studied at the Georg-August University (Göttingen) in Germany, and graduated cum laude and with a Phi Beta Kappa key from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I'm a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Member of the Society of Authors and the Crime Writers Association..

My detective novels include Sherlock Holmes And The Dead Boer At Scotney Castle, Sherlock Holmes And The

Mystery Of Einstein’s Daughter, Sherlock Holmes And The Case of the Bulgarian Codex, my first short story compilation titled 'A Most Diabolical Plot', Sherlock Holmes And The Strange Death of Brigadier-General Delves' (set in the island of my upbringing, Guernsey), and my latest, a second set of short stories titled 'The Torso At Highgate Cemetery and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories'. Clearly I like sending Holmes and Watson off to foreign parts, the more mysterious the better, as with my novel 'Sherlock Holmes And The Nine-Dragon Sigil'. Like my other 'sherlocks' it took me a year to write, of which perhaps four months was doing the research. I think now I could lecture at my old university, UCLA, on the final years of the Ch'ing Dynasty and the terrifying but beguiling Empress Dowager Cixi, the like this world may never see again.

I'm now doing a lot of research on the British Raj in 1911 because in my next novel I'm sending dear old Dr. John Watson off alone to Simla and Hyderabad in a last-minute effort to save British rule in India from violent overthrow.