About the Author

About the Author

Tim Symonds lives in the Sussex Weald – a series of wooded hills and valleys near the ancient Ashdown Forest, a region thoroughly familiar to Arthur Conan Doyle. He writes in a converted oast-house looking out at a bunch of rowdy jackdaws, with a field of Sussex Red cattle beyond, or on a laptop deep in nearby woodland, with folding canvas chairs stashed in several beautiful locations.

With Google/Wikipedia at the touch of a mouse, he has instant access to all the research he needs and, as he puts it, ‘Believe me, writing Sherlock Holmes novels  set in the Edwardian early 1900s in locations as varied as London, Sussex, the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, Switzerland, and (soon) the Forbidden City, Peking, at the end of the Ch’ing Dynasty needs a whole lot of research.’

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Tim was born in London and grew up in Somerset, Dorset and the Channel Island of Guernsey. At 16 he off for Africa in search of adventure. After working on a large sheep-farm high up on Mt. Kenya and driving bulldozers on bush-road construction sites along the Zambezi River, and two years in Canada, he emigrated to the United States. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Political Science, and at the Georg-August University, Göttingen, in Germany  He has travelled extensively through Mexico, and much of Central and South America and the Caribbean. He has been a current affairs television director in the Middle East, a free-lance political journalist, and stood twice for Britain’s House of Commons.