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Sherlock Retellings part 2: Interview with Anna Elliott and Charles Veley
183 Plays4 days ago
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/
For more information
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Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
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For a full episode transcript, visit https://cluedinmystery.com/sherlock-retellings-part-2-interview-with-anna-elliott-and-charles-veley/
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guests
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke, and we both love mystery. hi Brooke. Hi, Sarah. Today we have the first interview episode of this season.
00:00:25
Speaker
Yes, I'm very much looking forward to this interview because we've got two people that we're going to be speaking with. Anna Elliott and Charles Vealy are a father-daughter writing team who prove that crime-solving creativity runs in the family.
Genesis of Sherlock and Lucy Series
00:00:40
Speaker
Charles, with his Sherlock Holmes obsession, laid the groundwork for their first collaborative caper, the Sherlock and Lucy series. Anna joined the investigation from book three, bringing her flair for historical detail and strong female characters.
00:00:54
Speaker
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.
00:01:07
Speaker
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.
00:01:27
Speaker
um 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.
00:01:39
Speaker
Sure.
Character and Story Development
00:01:41
Speaker
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. In the original book, he narrated the whole book, in the first two books.
00:01:57
Speaker
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.
00:02:12
Speaker
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 Lucy, Sherlock and Lucy.
00:02:30
Speaker
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, you know,
00:02:42
Speaker
Holmes and Watson and they live at 221 B 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.
00:02:56
Speaker
And we do introduce other characters. Like my dad was saying, the character that I write is Lucy James. She's Sherlock Holmes's daughter that he only discovers when she's already an adult, a young woman.
00:03:09
Speaker
And then the 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.
00:03:24
Speaker
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...
Sherlock Holmes Narrative Style
00:03:34
Speaker
Then her husband has a younger sister and she and one of the Baker Street Irregulars that my dad, not invented, but I guess. He's not an official Baker Street Irregular, but 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 quite a bit. So yeah, and then
00:04:03
Speaker
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.
00:04:22
Speaker
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, handsome, and he's a great
Collaboration and Success Story
00:04:36
Speaker
hero. No wonder Boosie loves him. 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 um Tobias Gregson, who is, he's briefly mentioned as one of the Scotland Yard inspectors. Besides Lestrade. Yeah, besides Lestrade. We do often bring in Lestrade.
00:05:02
Speaker
i We also bring in Mycroft a lot. 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 he's he's going to bet be able to help us.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, Mycroft is a lot of fun to write. and but illustrate 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? Is that the one that think that's the one that's the one where he and list trader or is it?
00:05:36
Speaker
No, that's right. We're getting our, that books yeah, but he and list trader 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,
00:05:52
Speaker
quest for love and fulfillment, right? and that was That was really fun. We had a couple of books where he had ah a bit of an arc with the murder suspect of one of the stories and stuff.
00:06:06
Speaker
The most recent one we've done, his's 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 anded for India,
00:06:20
Speaker
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. Yeah. And guess what? They do.
00:06:34
Speaker
fascinating We do take a few liberties. The Pinkerton's Detective Agency, which was a real like detective agency. It's in them the Red Circle in the Valley of Fear. Yeah, occasionally there's a pinkerton 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.
00:06:53
Speaker
Which was it was a thing. which way There were female Pinkerton agents. they really yeah They really did do that. So um we had a lot of fun with her character as well. 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 um version of them all.
00:07:18
Speaker
Holmes never changes. There's a couple of parts, couple of times when he looks like he might be even dead, but he's as always going to win. He's always going to be the man.
00:07:31
Speaker
yeah And he's a good dad. yeah yeah 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 and now sort of a family that they've created here. but This is Lucy's mother, the sweetheart, and we meet her and in the first book also. She's a wonderful character. and we but She comes back in a couple of other adventures.
00:08:00
Speaker
Yeah. Goes to Egypt with him. that's a That was one of my favorites to write.
00:08:08
Speaker
So Charles, you began this series on your own. Yes. Beyond the lovely parallel of a father-daughter partnership that's reflected in your stories, what led to Anna joining you as co-author?
00:08:20
Speaker
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 a family and getting kids through school and all all that.
00:08:42
Speaker
But I still wanted to do it. So I wanted to do something that could be a fun hobby. And I've always loved Sherlock. I read the canon by myself as a kid in 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.
00:09:16
Speaker
and what to do. So I picked Sherlock Holmes because i always loved them. I kind of internalized that voice from reading them so much. So we tried that in the first one and had the idea of a daughter.
00:09:29
Speaker
and i even Anna and i was writing for Simon & Schuster at the time. right she is She's a bunch of historical novels that are also wonderful.
00:09:43
Speaker
um She was doing that. So, um Hey dad, how are you doing? and Doing anything? besides work. yeah I'm even thinking of doing a book. Oh, what's it going to, Oh, Sherlock. Oh, that's very nice. What, what, and what about
Approach to Writing and Adaptations
00:10:00
Speaker
it? there's going to be a daughter in Oh, really? And so we, I remember she even suggested the first, uh, first moment that we see it. Why don't you have her in,
00:10:11
Speaker
in the in in an opera scene, because she's going to be an actress, shes 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 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 and 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.
00:10:58
Speaker
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 I talked to with Anna and she said, yeah, why not? 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.
00:11:22
Speaker
And then I kind of kind of realized your own limitations. because I'm still working at 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.
00:11:37
Speaker
Who could possibly, do I know anybody who could possibly And, you know, we had a conversation in your kitchen, I think. 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 you you look up Anna-El and you go, Elliot, and you'll see a lot of other things that she's doing.
00:11:59
Speaker
And so she said yes. And the next thing I know, i have
00:12:06
Speaker
I mean, we switched from her. Yeah. We were going to write. 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.
00:12:17
Speaker
And I don't do short very well, though. It wound up it being a novel. Yeah. Like being a novel. And the rest is kind of history. We just, 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 yeah, it just took off from there.
00:12:33
Speaker
yeah That's great. But she had had it done. She had the beginning and middle and the end. Yeah, and then have we done? Like 40, 40-some stories? Well, actually, 36. There are 40 because we collected a lot of them into separate volumes.
00:12:55
Speaker
Lucy gets engaged to Jack. me Jack gets wounded at the end of the Jubilee problem. at the end of the jubilee problems And then... he He recovers, and but other bad things happen. But eventually, several books later, they get married. And so yeah so a lovely ceremony.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's that's how it's all come to pass, basically. Yeah.
Independent Projects and Spin-offs
00:13:24
Speaker
Well, that's just great. Are there any other Sherlock Holmes reimaginings that have inspired your work?
00:13:32
Speaker
Yes, yes, indeed. Definitely the Jeremy Brett series. Yeah. We love Jeremy Brett. We watched it. When I was growing up. So we've seen all of those. At Christmas time, we still play the blue carbuncle.
00:13:45
Speaker
that's 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... yeah you've find out that i do yeah Yeah, exactly. There's only so many ideas, you know, so yeah we just, i we don't read any others. um i look 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.
00:14:11
Speaker
And there are a whole lot of really, really good writers doing this stuff. There's Bonnie McByrd, there's... Yeah, Anthony Carpins, yeah. He may be the most successful overall mystery writer other than Agatha Christie. He's just fantastic. And he but 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.
00:14:39
Speaker
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.
00:15:00
Speaker
But it's darker. And I thought, well, you know, if I did if i did something like this, we'd try to be having the suspense and wonderful adventure but i'm not going to be the star 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 the grandchildren without you know yeah we don't you know what it's too dark and making them making them feel
00:15:37
Speaker
worried it was a worldbo come out all right Yeah. ah 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?
00:15:56
Speaker
Well, back before I started writing with my dad, I had a series um that was Jane Austen inspired. i have a um four 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.
00:16:17
Speaker
But I haven't written any anything like that since starting to
Collaborative Process and Writing Method
00:16:21
Speaker
work with my dad. um We did do, my dad's showing you the cover. As we were working on the Sherlock and Lucys, we mentioned the characters of Becky and Flynn, who are the Baker Street array. And we kept getting fan mail saying, are you going to continue the series to when they're grown up? And they they have this great chemistry as kids. And what would happen if they grew up and married each other?
00:16:41
Speaker
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.
00:16:53
Speaker
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.
00:17:17
Speaker
um they're over in france fighting um german spies and um solving mysteries over there becky grows up to be a surgeon battlefield surgeon um with the red cross uh hospitals and um sherlock holmes makes the occasional appearance but it's mostly becky and flynn um and you get a few cameos from the from our our first series that's really fun because like jack and lucy that we were talking about there they're they're young married couple um in our series but then as in becky and flynn they're a bit older they have children now so it's fun to give them sort of a happy ending um in that way and and get just a peek of where their lives that wind up those are those are all anna yeah those were just me i was the humble editor 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
00:18:10
Speaker
right there apart. 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.
00:18:25
Speaker
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 written 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. Yeah.
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah. And I did, as I said, back on back in the day, I went from teaching college to being a full-time writer to being a ah lawyer to being a corporate it well exec to being a corporate real estate exec.
Contributions to Canon and Charity Work
00:19:08
Speaker
So long, long checkered career, but during this the first books, you know, I go up back and look at it and it but they're pretty good, but there's nothing nothing there that I want to recreate.
00:19:22
Speaker
However, I did do some other books in the Sherlock Holmes vein, which are canonical books that could have appeared, it could be like Conan Doyle.
00:19:36
Speaker
There's a whole series, and it's a wonderful project. the The Estate of Conan Doyle has a, uh, uh, literally his, uh, his home that he built for his wife who had,
00:19:54
Speaker
I think tuberculosis, something, 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 and south of 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.
00:20:25
Speaker
Beautiful, beautiful building. 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 Conan Doyle died, it kind of fell into disrepair, but has since been taken up by a school for special needs kids, which has its own sources of funding, but a group called MX Publishing,
00:20:56
Speaker
thought it would be good to sell sherlock new Sherlock Holmes adventures that and give all the royalties to the to this ah school.
00:21:09
Speaker
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 ain't of adventures that are in one edition after another.
00:21:26
Speaker
and so that's that's been fun. But they're short stories and it's nothing like the larger efforts that we have. yeah Well, that's got to be extremely rewarding.
00:21:37
Speaker
That seems like a really wonderful project. And it is. And Anna's, I say I do do that. I did most of it, but it then Anna will take a look and add.
00:21:49
Speaker
Very little, really. there So the the deal with the Amex Publishing, because it's the Conan Doyle estate, it's only, you can only use um narrators and main characters that are in the canon.
00:22:03
Speaker
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. Yep.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, he does a great job with it. I don't think I've ever changed much more than a word or two here and there. You see that and good stuff. 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?
00:22:29
Speaker
Yeah, they did it they did ah they hired some illustrat painters and illustrators to illustrate the stories. And they picked ours as the first one to do. which was kind of nice. Yeah. And then like auctioned them off for yeah for the charity. It was neat. so yeah I think they've raised a quarter million dollars for this, for this school just for those books.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah. you know, And there's a whole of them. There are whole lot of other writers that have contributed to it. no So then there's just a whole lot of people writing Sherlock Holmes stuff.
00:23:03
Speaker
Which is
Closing Remarks and New Release Announcement
00:23:04
Speaker
one of the reasons why we kind of gravitated to the the Homefront Sleuths series, because we we enjoy that too, but there's a wider audience for it And it's a less crowded field, if you can believe it yeah
00:23:18
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, it sounds like you guys are a great team. ah yeah Yeah. We and we live tail away from each other.
00:23:30
Speaker
Well, this has been so fun to speak with you, Charles and Anna. but Thank you so much for joining us today. Sure. Thank you for having us.
00:23:41
Speaker
Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Yes, thank you so much. And um listeners, to learn more about Charles and Anna and their series, you can visit SherlockAndLucy.com.
00:23:53
Speaker
The two of you also have a brand new release as of September 5th, and it's The Harvest Festival Murders, A Homefront Sleuth's Mystery. So go out and pick up a copy of that.
00:24:05
Speaker
And then they're also on Facebook and Instagram under SherlockAndLucy. So thank you for joining us today on Clued in Mystery, listeners. I'm Brooke.
00:24:16
Speaker
And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued in Mystery is written and produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers. If you liked what you heard, please consider telling a friend, leaving a review, or subscribing with your favorite podcast listening app.
00:24:34
Speaker
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