Leslie S Klinger

Publications

He is the editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a three book edition of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction with extensive annotations, "hailed as the definitive exegesis of Holmes and his times;" the book won an Edgar Award. He also edited the scholarly ten-volume Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, a heavily annotated edition of the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, and The New Annotated Dracula, an annotated version of Bram Stoker's novel with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. In 2011, he co-edited with Laurie R. King The Grand Game, a two-volume collection of classical Sherlockian scholarship, published by The Baker Street Irregulars, and A Study in Sherlock, a collection of stories by all-star writers inspired by the Sherlock Holmes tales (Random House). Klinger and King edited another collection, In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, with more stories by great writers inspired by the Holmes canon, which was published by Pegasus Books in 2014. Klinger also wrote a short story, "The Closing," for that collection, his first fiction to be published in book form. Klinger and King edited a third volume of stories for Pegasus, entitled Echoes of Sherlock Holmes published in 2016 and are working on a fourth collection, tentatively titled For the Sake of the Game, due from Pegasus in October 2018.

The first two volumes of The Annotated Sandman, a four-volume edition of Neil Gaiman's award-winning The Sandman comics, for DC Comics, appeared in 2012; the third volume was published in 2014, and the fourth volume appeared in 2015. Klinger has completed Watchmen: The Annotated Edition for DC Comics, a thoroughly annotated edition of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's classic graphic novel Watchmen that will appear in November 2017.

Klinger also edited The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft for Liveright/W. W. Norton, a massive illustrated collection of heavily-annotated stories, published in 2014. A second annotated volume of Lovecraft tales, tentatively titled The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond the Mythos, will be published by Liveright in 2018. The New Annotated Frankenstein, also from Liveright/W. W. Norton, with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro was published in August 2017, in time for the 200th anniversary of Shelley's work.

Klinger has also contributed introductions to numerous books of mystery and horror, written book reviews for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other periodicals, and contributed an essay on vampires and sex, called Love Bites, to Playboy. A collection of all of his essays from 2007 through 2016, titled Baker Street Reveries, will be published in January 2018 by Wessex Press. He served as a consultant on the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey, Jr. and on the sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, released in 2011, as well as a number of other film scripts and comic book adaptations of the Holmes and Dracula stories.

In 2011, Klinger edited two collections of classic fiction, In the Shadow of Dracula and In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, both from IDW. In 2015, a third collection, In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe: Classic Horror, 1810-1916, was published by Pegasus Books. A fourth volume, In the Shadow of Agatha Christie: Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Women Authors, 1850-1917 will be published by Pegasus in January 2018.

Klinger , together with Laura Caldwell, a well-known writer and law professor at Loyola University Chicago and founder-director of Life After Innocence, edited an anthology titled Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted published by Liveright/W. W. Norton in March 2017. The anthology tells the stories of exonerees—individuals wrongfully incarcerated for crimes they did not commit—as told to major mystery and thriller writers. The volume is introduced by Scott Turow and Barry Scheck and also contains a previously-unpublished essay by the renowned playwright Arthur Miller on a wrongful conviction case. All authors' proceeds will be donated to Life After Innocence.

Literary organizations

Klinger is a member of the Sherlock Holmes literary club called The Baker Street Irregulars, as well as numerous other Sherlockian societies. He served three terms as chapter president of the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. He is a member of Sisters in Crime, the Horror Writers Association (and currently serves as the Treasurer of HWA), the Dracula Society, and the Transylvanian Society of Dracula.

He was the general editor of a number of books published by the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), including the Manuscript Series, and is currently the general editor of the BSI's Biography Series. He has lectured frequently on Holmes, Dracula, and the Victorian world and has taught a number of courses for UCLA Extension on Sherlock Holmes. He also taught a course on "Dracula and His World" for UCLA Extension in November 2009.

Lawsuit against Conan Doyle Estate Ltd

In February 2013, Klinger filed a copyright lawsuit against Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, a UK-based private company, which had demanded a license fee for the use of the Sherlock Holmes characters in a collection of stories In the Company of Sherlock Holmes. In the United States in 2013, only ten of Conan Doyle's sixty original Sherlock Holmes stories were in copyright, and the proposed stories relied only on aspects of the characters defined in public domain stories (such as Holmes's bohemian habits, deductive reasoning and many supporting characters).

In December 2013 Judge Rubén Castillo ruled that stories published prior to 1923 were in the public domain but that ten stories published after then were still under copyright. The stories in the public domain consist of the four novels and 46 short stories. Judge Castillo rejected a claim by Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. that some aspects of Holmes in the pre-1923 stories were protected by copyright because they were "continually developed" through the protected ten stories, which will not enter the public domain until 2022. The characters and events in the pre-1923 stories, including Holmes and Watson themselves, are free for use by any author or creator, while elements introduced in the copyrighted stories, such as Watson's rugby background with Blackheath and details of Holmes' retirement, remain protected by copyright law. In June 2014, in an opinion by Judge Richard Posner, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the lower court decision in favor of Klinger, and confirmed the public domain status of the pre-1923 material. In November 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a further appeal by Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, making the Court of Appeals' verdict final.

Awards

Klinger's awards for his editorial work include:

1999:

2003:

2005:

2006: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels

2012:

2014:

2015:

Biography

Klinger was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 2, 1946. He received a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and a J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley in 1970. It was in law school that he developed his interest in Holmes, leading him to amass a collection of thousands of books about the fictional detective. He practices law in the fields of tax, estate planning, and business in Los Angeles, California. He lives in Malibu, California, with his wife Sharon Flaum Klinger, who is a dealer in first-day-covers, their dog Jenny and their cat Mr. Giles.