Books

Coming soon: A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE

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Cover of "A Man Named Baskerville" by Jim Nelson

I’d like to tell you about my upcoming novel, A Man Named Baskerville.

The germ for the book comes from a train trip across Japan where I had nothing to read save for a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. From there I read The Hound of the Baskervilles and developed an idea I stored away inside my writing notebook:

What if I told Doyle’s original book from the point of view of the criminal rather than Dr. Watson?

I let this simple idea simmer for a few years before taking up the task. The result is my latest novel, due for publication this March.

To offer a taste, here’s my current back cover blurb:

He took on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and he lost.

Now he wants revenge.

In 1888, Sherlock Holmes slayed the spectral hound haunting the Devonshire moor, thereby laying to rest the curse of the Baskervilles once and for all. The perpetrator escaped into the night and was presumed drowned, consumed by the murky bog…

In truth, the criminal mastermind survived the night to nurse his wounds and plot his revenge against Sherlock Holmes.

A Man Named Baskerville recounts the life and times of Rodger Baskerville, heir to the esteemed family’s fortune. His journal records his adventures from the Amazon rainforests to the beaches of Costa Rica to Victorian England, where he attempts to rejoin his family and take his rightful place at Baskerville Hall. Along the way, he peels back the layers of family secrets and scandals untold in Watson’s account of the demonic hound haunting the Baskervilles.

Most of all, he describes a Sherlock Holmes unlike the detective you think you know.

A Man Named Baskerville retells the infamous Arthur Conan Doyle mystery in a way like you’ve never read before. It’s a sizzling new take on a classic hailed as a masterpiece of the English language, named one of the most influential books ever by the BBC and Le Monde, and beloved by Sherlock Holmes fans worldwide for over a century.

A Man Named Baskerville is a Victorian-era novel of crime and suspense about what may be the least-understood criminal in the Sherlock Holmes canon. As Holmes said of him, “We have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel … He is a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and a murderous heart.”

He also has a story of his own to tell, and that’s what A Man Named Baskerville is about.

If you want to be notified when the book is ready, sign up for my newsletter. Not only will you get a message when it’s ready, you’ll have a chance to buy early copies at a reduced price.

Advance readers wanted

I’m currently seeking advance readers. If you’d like to read an ARC (Advance Review Copy):

  • Send me an email at jimbonator@gmail.com with the Subject: line “ARC for A Man Named Baskerville”
  • I’ll send you a link to download a digital copy (in either EPUB or MOBI format)
  • You read it (sooner rather than later)
  • You submit an honest and personal review on its Amazon page when the book is released

And that’s all there is to it.

Note that the advance copy you receive may still have typos, small errors, etc. It will be missing the cover and the usual front and back matter. I’m now using the BookFunnel service to distribute ARCs, which should make it easy to load the book into your e-reader (or read online).

The ARC is not ready at this moment. If you email me, you should expect to receive a copy in the middle of March, about 1 to 2 weeks before the book is published.

Thank you!


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SPSFC: New Worlds Await

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I’ve teamed up with my fellow writers in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) to put together a special deal. We’re offering for a limited time downloading our books or selections from them. Here’s your chance to download over twenty books from work under consideration in the competition.

Included is my cyber-noir thriller In My Memory Locked, as well as plenty of other selections from all over the sci-fi gamut.


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“Man in the Middle” reviewed by Salty Air Publishing

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Man in the Middle, by Jim Nelson

Over at Salty Air Publishing, Paul Raymer reviews my COVID-19 novel Man in the Middle:

It is interesting that both Nelson and his character are unsure of what to do—how to react to the pandemic. Back in March of 2020 it was all new in terms of how to confront the disease, whether it was going to be short term and over in six months or long term and be with us for a long time. Some of the characters don’t seem to care—and that’s still true. …

The world is portrayed as gray, as a world after the apocalypse—stores closed, streets empty of cars and people. All that adds to the fact that the protagonist works the night shift. …

Read the full review here. Visit Salty Air Publishing’s web site for more books and reviews. And get your copy of Man in the Middle while you’re at it.

As a side note, Raymer adds, “Writing about the pandemic while it is going on was a bold challenge.” For those interested, I described this challenge a while back in “Why I wrote a novel about COVID-19”.


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Status

IN MY MEMORY LOCKED selected for the SPSFC

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In My Memory Locked by Jim Nelson

This morning I received an email informing me In My Memory Locked was accepted for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC).

This is the contest organized by Hugh Howey (WOOL) and Duncan Swan (Monstre), well-known authors in the independent publishing arena. They’ve organized ten teams of 59 judges (authors, readers, and podcasters) to narrow the field to a final winner.

Three hundred books were selected for the running, so there’s plenty of competition. The SPSFC generated a ton of buzz via word-of-mouth in the self-publishing community. The number of entrants blew past the 300 mark within hours of accepting applications. I’m plenty proud to have made the first cut.

The first round group my entry is a part of will be judged by File 770.

If you’re curious what the hub-bub is over, check out In My Memory Locked, available now in Kindle and paperback.

Semi-finalists will be announced January of next year. Finalists and winner are announced in June. Fingers crossed!


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Video

Forgotten video of Everywhere Man rediscovered

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Only by accident did I discover this 2012 video of the first chapter of Everywhere Man, my novella about the ubiquitousness of modern photography, personal disillusionment, and San Francisco’s cable cars. (Trust me—it all hangs together.)

I produced this in 2012 with iMovie. (It shows in the final product.) I intended this to be used for readings to give a flavor of the book’s tone and content. I recall showing it at a reading I gave at the Mechanics Institute, and perhaps elsewhere.

The superb music was scored and produced by Jesse Solomon Clark. The haunting photos, snapped in and around Union Square and Fisherman’s Wharf, were taken by Veronica Weber.

A quasi-relic of a different time.

Everywhere Man by Jim Nelson

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Audio

Interview with Reading and Writing Podcast

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Posted this week is my interview with Jeff Rutherford at the Reading and Writing Podcast.

During our talk, I discuss my cyber-noir mystery In My Memory Locked, as well as a little on my Bridge Daughter series. It was a great time with Jeff, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Check out the interview at podpage.com or YouTube.


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A year in the middle

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Man in the Middle, by Jim Nelson

The first chapter of my novel Man in the Middle opens a year ago today.

It’s an odd anniversary to observe, the setting of a book. I didn’t start writing it a year ago today. That came later, after a bit of soul-searching if I really wanted to write a novel about the pandemic during the pandemic.

In some ways, though, I did start writing the novel a year ago. I began keeping a daily diary last March when it grew apparent that the spread of COVID-19 was going to be more than a particularly nasty flu season. The first entry on March 14 is a little over a week before the book’s time-frame. I set the novel’s opening chapter ten days later, March 24, to coincide with the timing of California’s statewide order to lockdown and shelter-in-place. I was tempted to open the book earlier, as my entries on the 21 and 22 both demonstrate the alarm rising within me, as the hard realities of the pandemic started to loom.

The early diary entries show me obsessing over the peculiarities of the then-present moment. Those were days of keeping John Hopkins University COVID-19 map open in a persistent browser tab, so I could check it every few hours. The red dots across the forty-eight contiguous states gave the effect of an America with a case of chicken pox; later I would call it a “creeping horror.” The buses running across San Francisco were suddenly empty, and in a few days most lines weren’t running at all. Downtown San Francisco businesses boarded up their windows, even the storied hotels, which normally operated with doors open twenty-four hours a day. After a trip to Costco for supplies, and witnessing panic-buying first-hand, me and several other beleaguered shoppers took the elevator down to the parking lot. A woman in the back began singing “There’s no way out of here.” At least people still had a sense of humor.

Dog running down a near-empty Geary St., San Francisco on March 17, 2020. I lived near the intersection the dog is approaching. Normally the traffic would be bumper-to-bumper. In a few days, the windows would be boarded up and the streets even more deserted.

During this time period, I jogged down the center line of Montgomery Street at 4:30pm on a Thursday—the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, normally thronged with stockbrokers and bankers, suddenly looking like the set for a zombie movie. I also recorded having an on-again-off-again cough and running nose, which left me reeling between paranoia and chiding myself for being paranoid.

The nucleus of Man in the Middle is buried in my diary entry for March 22: “It would be funny if we emerge from our shelter-in-place hibernation four months from now and discover the rich and powerful have rewritten all the rules to further favor themselves.” (Four months from now. Ha.)

So many failures of those early weeks have been tossed down the collective memory hole. Multiple times I noted news reports of government officials from both sides of the aisle claiming broad martial law powers during a pandemic. Social network users were suggesting it was time for “appropriate” shaming of people for wearing masks—you read that right—while the media sought to pretend it never downplayed the coronavirus over the flu, or ever referred to COVID-19 by the city it was first detected in.

Months after the first vaccine was greenlighted for the general population, and after a year of lockdowns, fervent hand-washing, and face masks, COVID-19 numbers are still ticking the wrong direction. Or, they’re not. Maybe there is no way out of here.


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