At the Pub with my Publisher

Dan Andriacco and Steve Emecz drink Sherlock Holmes Ale at the Sherlock Holmes Pub

Today is our 37th wedding anniversary. Happy anniversary, love of my life!
We now resume our regularly scheduled blog post.


Almost a week after coming home, I'm still reveling in the memories of what turned out to be a Sherlockian pilgrimage through and through. I'll be writing about it for quite a while on this blog, not to mention the impact it will have on my next two books.

On our second evening in London we had dinner at the Sherlock Holmes Pub. For Ann and me this was the second time, the first being on a weekend in London in 1997. It's a great pub, with excellent food, incomparable atmosphere, and reasonable prices.

One of the highlights, as many of you may know, is a reconstruction of Sherlock Holmes' sitting room, originally created for the Festival of Britain in 1951. A photo of it appears on the back of the Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
 
We arrived to find my publisher, Steve Emecz of MX Publishing, hard at work on his iPad as he waited for us to arrive. Is there ever a time when Steve is not working? I was astonished to learn that Steve, who is now by far the leading publisher of Sherlock Holmes material in the world, has a day job and is not a full-time publisher. You could have fooled me!

Steve became a publisher when the publisher of his highly popular first novel went bankrupt before paying Steve the royalty check that he expected to use to buy a car. Clearly, this is not a man to be stopped by potholes in the road to success. I suspect it is in the genes. Steve's father escaped from Hungary during the 1956 uprising.

Talking to Steve over dinner made for a fascinating evening.