Father-daughter writing team Anna Elliott and Charles Veley join Brook and Sarah to discuss writing within the world created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Discussed and mentioned
Remember, Remember (2017) Anna Elliott and Charles Veley
The Sign of Four (1890) Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlet (1887) Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventure of the Time Machine (2024) Anna Elliott and Charles Veley
“The Adventure of the Red Circle” (1911) Arthur Conan Doyle
The Valley of Fear (1915) Arthur Conan Doyle
Christmas on the Nile (2020) Anna Elliott and Charles Veley
The Jubilee Problem (2017) Anna Elliott and Charles Veley
The House of Silk (2011) Anthony Horowitz
About Anna and Charles
Website: https://sherlockandlucy.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SherlockandLucy
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sherlockandlucy/
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Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi Sarah. Today we have the first interview episode of this season. |
| Sarah | Yes, I’m very much looking forward to this interview because we’ve got two people that we’re going to be speaking with. |
| Sarah | Anna Elliott and Charles Veley are a father-daughter writing team who prove that crime-solving creativity runs in the family. Charles, with his Sherlock Holmes obsession, laid the groundwork for their first collaborative caper, the Sherlock and Lucy series. |
| Sarah | Anna joined the investigation from book three, bringing her flair for historical detail and strong female characters. Together, they’ve reimagined Baker Street’s famous resident while introducing readers to the delightful Lucy James, proving that sometimes two heads are better than one when it comes to solving literary puzzles. |
| Brook | Well, welcome, Charles and Anna. We are so excited to be speaking with you today. Last week, we released an episode where we talked about various books and shows that carry on the Sherlock story and reimagine it. And so we’re so pleased to be able to speak with you guys who are actually creating some of those stories. |
| Brook | So first of all, without giving too much away, please introduce the characters in your series and share how you’ve reimagined the world of Sherlock Holmes through their eyes. |
| Charles | Sure. Well, we’ve got all this characters that are in the original, the Conan Doyle original, the major characters. There’s Watson narrates many chapters in our shared books. |
| Charles | In the original book, he narrated the whole book, in the first two books. But then when Anna came in, she narrated the most important character, new character who is the daughter that Sherlock discovers that he has in the first in the first book. |
| Charles | And then suddenly, suddenly, life is very different for Sherlock, although Sherlock is pretty much making it be the same. But then Anna can talk about the the other characters that go along with the with the Lucy, Sherlock and Lucy. |
| Anna | Yeah, so… I think, ah like my dad was saying, we we’ve tried to stick pretty closely to the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon with Holmes and Watson and they live at 221B Baker Street. And and there’s there’s other authors out there, I’m sure, that sort of do vary it a bit more. But for us, it was important to to really be pretty grounded in the canon. |
| Anna | And we do introduce other characters, like my dad was saying. The character that I write is Lucy James. She’s Sherlock Holmes’ daughter that he only discovers when she’s already an adult, a young woman. |
| Anna | um And then more characters have just sort of joined ah organically along the way. We’ve got um Lucy’s husband, whom she meets in the first book that I co-authored with my dad called Remember, Remember. |
| Anna | um They meet in that book and then their whole sort of love story plays out for the over the next couple of books. And they there’s sort of an arc of them getting married. And then her husband has a younger sister and she and one of the Baker Street irregulars that my dad not invented, but I guess yeah he be he’s not he’s not an official Baker Street irregular, but. |
| Anna | He’s a character that we created. um So that these two, Becky and Flynn, are their children who act as sort of the our version of the Baker Street Irregulars. And they’re a lot of fun to write as well. We both really enjoy them um quite a bit. So yeah. And then… |
| Charles | They have relationships. but the other but Flynn is about a year or so older than Becky, and Becky’s a tomboy. And then Flynn grew up on the streets, and Becky grew up the daughter of a woman who left, basically, and a father who’s absolutely no good. |
| Charles and Anna | Raised by her brother, Jack, who is a really good heart, soul policeman. Also, he’s pretty good at the Daring Do stuff. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, and he’s a great hero. No wonder Lucy loves him. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. |
| Anna | That’s right. That’s right. and Yeah, so yeah, I guess that’s that’s our core cast of characters, and then from time to time, we’ll bring in somebody else from the canon. We brought in Tobias Gregson, who is, he’s briefly mentioned as one of the Scotland Yard inspectors. |
| Charles | Besides Lestrade. |
| Anna | Yeah, besides Lestrade. We do often bring in Lestrade. |
| Charles | We also bring in Mycroft a lot. Mycroft a lot. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. |
| Charles | Mycroft’s the British government. If you’ve got a big case that something bad might happen that it’s going to have bad consequences, Mycroft better know about it and hes he’s going to bet be able to help us. |
| Anna | Yeah, Mycroft is a lot of fun to write. and but and Lestrade is pretty close, I would say, to the canon. um Gregson was fun because he’s really only mentioned in, is it The Sign of Four? |
| Charles and Anna | Is that the one that? think that’s the one. That’s the one where he and Lestrade are, or is it? No, Study in Scarlet. That’s right. We’re getting our stories mixed up. |
| Sarah | Mm-hmm. |
| Anna | Yeah, but he and Lestrade kind of have a rivalry. So he’s not a particularly well-developed character, but we did a bit more with him and and sent him on his own sort of, um quest for love and fulfillment, right? and that was That was really fun. We had a couple of books um where he had ah a bit of an arc with the murder suspect of one of the stories and stuff. |
| Charles | The most recent one we’ve done, his his arc has come to a very happy end and he and his wife are about to get on what’s called a cruise ship headed for headed for India, |
| Charles and Anna | It’s called The Adventure of the Time Machine. and that one bad things could happen. That could not end very well unless the Baker Street gang can save them. |
| Charles | Yeah, and guess what? |
| Anna | They do. We do take a few liberties. The Pinkerton’s detective agency, which was a real like detective agency. |
| Charles | It’s in the Red Circle and The Valley of Fear. |
| Anna | Yeah, occasionally. |
| Charles | There’s a Pinkerton. |
| Anna | There’s a Pinkerton, and we took one of them and actually made her a woman who was disguised as a man when Sherlock Holmes first met her. |
| Charles | Which was it was a thing. |
| Anna | There were female Pinkerton agents. They really did do that. So um we had a lot of fun with her character as well. [Charles: Yeah] So we we have sort of occasionally taken liberties with a very minor character from the Doyle canon and made it our own and had fun with it. but As far as the core canon, we try to be very respectful and stick to stick to Conan Doyle’s version of them all. |
| Charles | Holmes never, never changes. There’s a couple of parts, couple of times when he looks like he might be even dead, but he’s always going to win. He’s always going to be the man. And he’s a good dad. |
| Anna | Yeah, he and Lucy have a good relationship. It’s fun it’s fun to watch him. You know yeah we I guess our version is maybe a little softer because he has been softened by… the influence of having a daughter or and now it’s sort of a family that they’ve created here. |
| Charles | This is Lucy’s mother, the sweetheart. We meet her and in the first book also. and She’s a wonderful character. and we but She comes back in a couple of other adventures. |
| Anna | Yeah. |
| Charles | Goes to Egypt with them. |
| Anna | That was one of my favorites to write. [Charles: Christmas on the Nile.] Christmas on the Nile. That was one of my favorites to write. |
| Sarah | So Charles, you began this series on your own. |
| Charles | Yes. |
| Sarah | Beyond the lovely parallel of a father-daughter partnership that’s reflected in your stories, what led to Anna joining you as co-authors? |
| Charles | Well, I had one book and I put it up on Amazon. just because I used to write mysteries also and then I became a corporate lawyer and a corporate exec and everything creative had to be you know subordinate to raising the family, getting kids through school and all all that. But I still wanted to do it. So I wanted to do something that could be a fun hobby. And I always loved Sherlock. |
| Charles | I read the canon by myself as a kid. and college, I even read the whole series. I did an actual paper on the detective story in college. And then, so, okay, I’m getting a towards the end of the corporate career. and I’ve got time to do stuff a little bit and what to do. So I picked Sherlock Holmes because I always loved him. And like I could… |
| Charles | I kind of internalized that voice when we were reading him so much. So we tried that in the first one and had the idea of a daughter. Anna was writing for Simon & Schuster at the time. right she is She’s a bunch of historical novels that are also wonderful. |
| Charles | She was doing that, so, hey, Dad, how are you doing? and Doing anything besides work? |
| Brook | Yeah. |
| Charles | Yeah, I’m even thinking of doing a book. Oh, what’s it going? Oh, Sherlock, oh, that’s very nice. what What about it? Oh, there’s going to be a daughter in Oh, really? And so we I remember she even suggested the first first moment that we see it. Why don’t you have her? And in the in in an opera scene, because she’s going to be an actress, she’s she should be in an opera. So that kind of had the, she’s in the Gilbert and Sullivan version of The Mikado that was in fact playing in 1895 at the time that we were writing this. so |
| Charles | So that was good, and it went up, and people liked it. you know we I didn’t have a lot of money for publicity or anything, but got enough reviews and on its own that one day I get a Twitter message from Thomas & Mercer, which is a publishing house that publishes Ian Fleming and a whole lot of other mysteries. They specialize in mysteries. They’re subsidiary of Amazon. |
| Charles | And they said, hey, yeah we we like you we like your book. We’d like to buy it. And would you be open to that? And so I talked to Anna and she said, yeah, why not? and What do you have to lose? Let them do it and then you can write on get on to writing the next one. So I got on to writing the next one. They liked that too, but that one has Lucy in it as well. |
| Charles | And then I kind of kind of realized your own limitations. because I’m still working the time, and I’m thinking, you know, I’m not doing Lucy enough justice. She really should be more of a feature in this whole series. |
| Charles | who could possibly… Do I know any anybody who could possibly, possibly… And we had conversation in your kitchen, |
| Charles | And so she thought about it and because this means she’s got to focus on that instead of the other stuff she’s doing because she ah you you look up Anna Elliot, and you’ll see a lot of other things that she’s doing. |
| Charles | And so she said yes. And the next thing I know, i have a manuscript from her. |
| Anna | Yeah, we were going to write. |
| Anna | I just I think the way we we originally thought of it was I was going to do a couple of short stories with Lucy and I don’t do short very well, though it wound up that being a novel, being a novel. And the rest is kind of history. We just [Charles: yeah yeah] we realized we worked really well as a team and yeah didn’t want to stop. I had more stories to tell. So, yeah, it just took off from there. |
| Charles | Yeah that so that was Anna was did that just about all herself. |
| Brook | That’s great. |
| Charles | But she had had it done. She had the beginning and middle and the end |
| Anna | Yeah, and then what have we done? Like 40-some stories? |
| Charles | Well, actually, 36. There are 40 because we collected a lot of them into separate volumes. Some of them are shorter stories, and those are collected into different volumes. |
| Charles | So we, yeah, it went on and on. Lucy gets engaged to Jack. Jack gets wounded at the end of, at the end of The Jubilee Problem. And then he recovers, and but other bad things happen. But eventually, several books later, they get married. And so yeah so a lovely ceremony. |
| Anna | Yeah. Yeah So, yeah, that’s that’s how it’s all come to pass, basically. Yeah. |
| Brook | Well, that’s just great. Are there any other Sherlock Holmes reimaginings that have inspired your work? |
| Charles | Yes, yes indeed. |
| Anna | Definitely the Jeremy Brett series. Yeah. |
| Charles | We love Jeremy Brett. We watched it… |
| Anna | …when I was growing up. |
| Charles | So we’ve seen all of those. At Christmas time we still play “The Blue Carbuncle.” |
| Anna | Yeah, it was so good. Yeah, that’s definitely our our favorite. I think that’s the most faithful to the canon. We try to steer clear of reading any other books because, you know, you don’t want… |
| Charles | Yeah, you find out … |
| Anna | Yeah, exactly. There’s only so many ideas, you know, so yeah we just, I we don’t read any others. |
| Charles | We look at them because, you know, they come in and we we we see the summaries and so forth and so we’ll know. And there a whole lot of really, really good writers doing this stuff. There’s Bonnie McByrd. Anthony Horowitz. He may be the most successful overall oh mystery writer of other than Agatha Christie. |
| Charles | He’s just fantastic. He wrote one that kind of gave me the idea that, yeah, I could do this sort of thing too, which was, it’s called The House of Silk. |
| Charles | And it’s beautifully written. It’s in the voice of Watson. It’s poignant. Watson is older. And and it’s ah it’s a great story with a lot of a lot of suspense and a lot of cliffhanger moments. |
| Charles | But it’s darker. and I thought, well, you know, if I if i did something like this, we’d try to be having the suspense. and a wonderful adventure, but I’m not going to be this dark. |
| Charles | And so that’s kind of the vibe that we keep going with. So, you know, I read, I read this whole thing, everything to Anna back when she was a kid. And I don’t, the stuff that, things that we do, I want to be able to read to grandchildren without, you know, |
| Anna | Yeah, we don’t want it too dark. |
| Charles | Making them feel, worried it was a world come out all right. |
| Sarah | In addition to this collaborative series, you both write independently. Could you tell us a little bit about your individual projects and how they differ from or maybe they complement your Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James books? |
| Anna | Well, back before I started writing with my dad, I had a series um that was Jane Austen inspired. I have a um four or five books in that series that are all kind of retellings or reimagining of Jane Austen or taking a minor character from a Jane Austen story and and and and developing them a bit more. |
| Anna | But I haven’t written any anything like that since starting to work with my dad. um We did do, dad’s showing you the cover. As we were working on the Sherlock and Lucys, um we mentioned the characters of Becky and Flynn, who are the Baker Street irregulars. We kept getting fan mail saying, are you going to continue the series to when they’re grown up? And they’re they have this great chemistry as kids, and what would happen if they grew up and married each other? |
| Anna | And i we didn’t, you don’t really want to progress the main series to that point, because um then all of your other characters are 20 years older, and it’s just, you know, it’s it’s not the same, it’s the same thing. |
| Anna | But I said, well, you know, when they’re grown up, it’s going to be about World War I era. That would be a really fun backdrop for them as adults. So I did do five books in a spinoff series of Becky and Flynn um as as adults solving mysteries during World War I. They’re over in France. Flynn is in the army. |
| Anna | They’re over in France fighting German spies and um solving mysteries over there. Becky grows up to be a surgeon. Battlefield surgeon with the Red Cross Hospitals. And Sherlock Holmes makes the occasional appearance, but it’s mostly Becky and Flynn. And you get a few cameos from our first series. That’s really fun because Jack and Lucy that we were talking about, they’re a young married couple in our series. But then and Becky and Flynn, they’re a bit older. They have children now. So it’s fun to give them a sort of a happy ending um in that way and, and get just a peek of where their lives that wind up. |
| Charles | Those are all Anna. |
| Anna | Those were just me. |
| Charles | I was the humble editor. |
| Anna | We used to write a bit more of a tag team, like one of us would start a series and then the other one or a story. And then the other one would, write their part. So, I had some downtime while I was waiting for chapters from my dad. And I would, I was like, well, I want to be writing something. So that’s where the Becky and Flynn came out. I would, I would write those during the downtime when I was waiting for my dad to get something to me. |
| Anna | But um our most recent series, we’ve kind of changed the way that we work a little bit now. We, we just do it chapter by chapter. Yeah. This series we’ve, we, we’ve write more quickly and constantly sending things back and forth. So, I don’t have the downtime anymore to write anything um just independently, which is fine. I’m, I’m happy. We’re happy and busy where we’re at. |
| Charles | And I did, as I said, back on back in the day, went from teaching college to being a full-time writer to being a ah lawyer to being a corporate exec to being a corporate real estate exec. So long, long checkered career, but during the first books, You know, I go up back and look at it, and but they’re pretty good, but there’s nothing, nothing there that I want to recreate. |
| Charles | However, I did do some other books in the Sherlock Holmes vein, which are canonical books that could have appeared, that could be like Conan Doyle. There’s a whole series, and it’s a wonderful project. The Estate of Conan Doyle, has a uh uh literally his uh his home that he built for his wife who had I think tuberculosis, something, yeah some disease in the respiratory tract that made her find it very difficult to live in London. So she was in Switzerland trying to get well, and Conan Doyle found this place south of London which somebody told him this is really good for people trying to recuperate from respiratory diseases. So he immediately built this estate, beautiful, beautiful building. |
| Charles | And of course, after, and she moved and they had another six or eight more years, which was six or eight more years than they thought she was going to have. So that was a wonderful thing. After Colin Doyle died, it kind of fell into disrepair, but has since been taken up by a school for special needs kids. |
| Charles and Anna | Which has its own sources of funding, but a group called MX Publishing thought it would be good to sell Sherlock—new—Sherlock Holmes adventures that and give all the royalties to the to this school. |
| Charles | And so that that’s their project. If you look up MX Publishing, you’ll see that’s the main thing that they do. but they They reached out to me and said, would I do something? And I think I’ve done eight at know adventures that are in one edition after another. |
| Charles | And so that’s that’s been fun. But they’re short stories and it’s nothing like the larger efforts that we have. |
| Brook | Yeah. Well, that’s got to be extremely rewarding. That seems like a really wonderful project. |
| Charles | And it is. I say I did most of it, but then Anna will take a look and add things to it. |
| Anna | Very little, really. So the deal with the MX Publishing, because it’s the Conan Doyle estate, you can only use narrators and main characters that are in the canon. |
| Anna | So you can’t, for example, use Lucy James because she’s not, you know, ah Sherlock Holmes character. So I can’t write any of the um point of views. It’s all narrated by Watson. So my dad writes those. And yeah, yeah and he does a great job with that. I don’t think I’ve ever changed much more than a word or two here and there. |
| Charles | She’s adding good stuff. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. |
| Anna | Yeah, but just just take a look after it’s done. is But yeah, but that was fun. We got, what was the art book that they? |
| Charles | Yeah, they did it they did a they hired some illustrators painters and illustrators to illustrate the stories. And they picked ours as the first one to do, which was kind of nice. |
| Sarah | Oh, wow. |
| Anna | Yeah and then like auctioned them off for yeah for the charity. It was neat. |
| Charles | I think they’ve raised a quarter million dollars for this board the school just for those books. And there’s a whole lot of them. There’s a whole lot of other writers that have contributed to it. So then there’s just a whole lot of people writing Sherlock Holmes stuff, which is one of the reasons why we kind of gravitated to the the Homefront Sleuths series, because we enjoy that too, but there’s a wider audience for and it’s a less crowded field, if you can believe it yeah |
| Sarah | Wonderful. Well, it sounds like you guys are a great team. |
| Anna | Yeah, they know. We live its ah tell away from each other. |
| Charles | yeah we used to be in kind I used to be in Connecticut, and she used to be in First Princeton and then right outside Washington. And then she moved up to this area in Pennsylvania, which happens to be the area that I grew up in. But then they wound up buying a house that was, oh, five, ten minutes away from the town where I grew up. |
| Charles | And I thought, well, this is kind of karma. |
| Sarah | Well, this has been so fun to speak with you, Charles and Anna. um Thank you so much for joining us today. |
| Anna | Sure. Thank you for having us. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a pleasure. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
