A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Y Is For Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a very prolific American author of about 70 books and many short stories. She is best known for her horror fiction, especially the novels about vampire Saint Germain. So I was surprised to find that she has also written some mystery fiction, even if it is basically Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. I only have her novella length ebook The Case Of The American Twins, but she wrote a series of books featuring Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, with Bill Fawcett, under the pen name Quinn Fawcett, so it’s a universe with which she is familiar.

This novella is based on a play of the same name(see above for a poster). It’s not written in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. It is set early in Holmes’ career, and Holmes asks Watson not to write about it, because the client wants confidentiality, so it is in third person, unlike the original stories, which are told in first person as if written for publication.

The story starts with an American woman, one of the twins of the title, coming to Holmes for help in finding her brother, whom she hasn’t seen in four years, but their father has died, leaving them a huge estate.

 Holmes doesn’t do the usual observations that let him work out who he is dealing with; when the client is impressed with what he knows about her, he explains that he got the information from the American Ambassador. Then he visits Mycroft to ask for help in getting information. 

Still, an interesting story and not her only one. It’s available in print as part of the two stories in the Sherlock Holmes Collection. It’s on Amazon, but rather expensive for paperback, at about A $50.00, with free overseas shipping. It’s not available in Kindle, but American Twins is in Apple Books.

See you tomorrow for my Z post!