As a boy I had loved Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton stories, in which dozens of characters from fiction were incorporated into one coherent world, and I had greatly enjoyed watching my friends Kim Newman and Alan Moore build their own Wold Newton-descended worlds in the Anno Dracula sequence and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, respectively. It looked like fun. I wondered if I could try something like that.

The ingredients of the story I had in the back of my head combined in ways that were better than I had hoped when I began. (Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.)

“A Study in Emerald” won the Hugo Award in August 2004 as Best Short Story, something that still makes me intensely proud. It also played its part in my finding myself, the following year, mysteriously inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars.

“THE FAIRY REEL”

Not much of a poem, really, but enormous fun to read aloud.

“OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR”

Written for Peter Straub, for the remarkable volume of Conjunctions that he guest-edited. It began some years earlier, at a convention in Madison, Wisconsin, at which Harlan Ellison had asked me to collaborate with him on a short story. We were placed inside a rope barrier, Harlan at his typewriter, me at my laptop. But before we could start the short story, Harlan had an introduction to finish, so while he finished his introduction I started this story and showed it to him. “Nope. It reads like a Neil Gaiman story,” he said. (So I put it aside and started another story, which Harlan and I have now been collaborating on ever since.