We all know the story. Sherlock Holmes is a legendary character created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Most people rate Holmes as arguably the world’s best-known detective. Conan Doyle passed away in 1975 and the Copywrite to the character expired in 1980, and then after a brief renewal, expired again in 2000.
The character is now free for use because of a stipulation that states that all characters created before 1923 enter the public domain. This is where we meet author William David
Ellis and the story of how his love for the character inspired him to create more original stories featuring the world’s most famous detective. But before we delve into that, it is only fair to explore his origin story.
“I began to write as soon as I could hold a pen,” David Ellis explained. “It just seemed natural. My father was an English teacher, but my mother was a reader, and her reading to my brother and I created an appetite for books that I never got over. Finally, I decided to write my own stories, and then those stories became books, and friends read them and said you should try to publish, so I did.”
It was his love for Sherlock Holmes that helped him build fresh stories featuring the character, and he now has a book called Sherlock Holmes: Angels Saints and Sinners The Conversion of Sherlock Holmes available on Amazon.
“I like Sherlock Holmes,” he responded. “I wondered if I could write him, so I tried and I did, and it is as simple as that. If you immerse yourself in the literature, it comes out your pores and fingers and ideas.”
He explained that it was his love for Conan Doyle’s stories that really amplified his ambition to write Sherlock Holmes. The originality and flavor caught his attention, and he pursued that goal.
But as always with characters in the public domain, it is a fine balance in crafting out stories that would make sense for them.
David Ellis made the stories and the character as entertaining as possible. He strove to give his readership the stories they would enjoy and therefore take the character to the next level.
Along with Sherlock Holmes, he also has a story called Kisses of my Enemy available. It garnered the number 1 ranking in Christian Fantasy on Amazon.
“I didn’t know what the word genre meant when I started writing the Harry Ferguson Series, which Kisses of my Enemy is part of,” he explained. “I just wrote the kind of story I like. Its voice and world are that of Texas, rural redneck Texas. And Sherlock Holmes is an entirely different voice, Victorian England, and never shall the two meet. So how that happened is beyond me, it certainly was not deliberate or conscious.”
Along with these two stories, David Ellis has also penned other novels such as Dragons and Romans, The Harry Ferguson Chronicles: The Princess Who Forgot She Was Beautiful, and Dances With My Dragon.
In his spare time, when he is not writing, he raises honeybees and hangs out at a small café where stories come to him just by listening to the surrounding environment. He has a simple goal.
“I want to entertain as many people as possible, bring hope into their lives, and make enough money to do this for a living.”