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Bob Byrne regularly blogs for the World Fantasy Award-winning website, BlackGate.com, where he is ostensibly the in-house mystery guy. However, to his editor's consternation, he keeps spearheading the site's coverage of Robert E. Howard.

He has written for Black Mask Magazine, Sherlock Magazine, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Steeger Books, and the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (multiple volumes).

He is a (self-declared) leading expert on Solar Pons (the 'Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street') and has also written extensively about Holmes, and Nero Wolfe. Primarily a writer of mystery fiction and nonfiction, he has won two Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards for his work related to the creator of Conan.

Proving that God has a sense of humor, while he loves words and writing and hates math, he is a career budget analyst and fiscal officer in the public and non-profit sectors. He has lived in Colorado Springs, Austin, and (mostly) Columbus (OH). In his long-ago youth, he competed at the Ultimate (Frisbee) World, and National, Championships, and is a life-long Role Playing Gamer.

Search his name at www.BlackGate.com, or read his writings at www.SolarPons.com (the world's leading Solar Pons website), and at his blog, Almost Holmes.

"Marcum could be today's greatest Sherlockian writer, . . . ." Lee Child - New York Times Bestselling Author

"David Marcum is the reigning monarch of all things Sherlockian . . . ." John Lescroart - New York Times Bestselling Author

"Among the best I must number David Marcum, who, by this point has written more Holmes stories than Doyle himself. Characterized by unflagging imagination and ceaseless ingenuity, along with felicitous prose, these tales continue to provide what we all crave: more Sherlock." - Nicholas Meyer - New York Times Bestselling Author

"Marcum himself again demonstrates his gift for emulating the feel of The Canon . . . ." - Publishers Weekly

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts.

He has edited over sixty books, most Sherlockian-related anthologies, and is the author of nearly 90 Sherlockian pastiches (so far), some published in anthologies and others collected in his own books, "The Papers of Sherlock Holmes", "Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt", and "Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins". He has edited over 800 Holmes pastiches and over sixty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, including the ongoing series "The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories", which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 30 volumes, with several more in preparation.

He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, "The Papers of Solar Pons", and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke.

He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, "A Seventeen Step Program", addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/

Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat from autumn to spring, and often summer as well. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

I have been a Sherlockian since my teens, enjoying the original stories and relishing in all of the various Sherlockian variations. I currently co-edit Canadian Holmes, a quarterly journal from the Bootmakers of Toronto. I have edited and contributed to several Sherlockian books.