Barry Grant Books in Order

Barry Grant is the pen name used by novelist and translator Barry Brissman. He is best known for four Sherlock Holmes novels that imagine Holmes waking up in the 21st century. It is a premise that says a lot about Grant's interests, old books, long journeys, and the strange friction between the past and the present.

His reading life seems to have started early. On visits to his grandmother's house in Moline, Illinois, he found his late grandfather's library packed into barrister bookcases that reached the ceilings. There he met writers like Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Poe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, and Conan Doyle. That mix of adventure, history, and classic storytelling stayed with him.

North Dakota mattered just as much. In biographical notes attached to his work, Grant says he was eleven when he first boarded the North Coast Limited in Chicago and traveled to his uncles' farm for the summer. He kept returning every summer until he finished high school, and those trips gave him a lasting feel for prairies, big skies, loneliness, and agriculture.

He seems to have learned as much from landscape as from libraries.

Later journeys widened the picture. He has written about traveling up the Amazon by boat and crossing the Atlas Mountains to Zagora in a Volkswagen Beetle, but he also said those early North Dakota trips stayed closest to him. That balance between restlessness and rootedness helps explain the feel of his fiction. The Holmes books move fast, but they also care about memory, displacement, and the awkward business of finding your footing in a changed world.

Before publishing the Sherlock Holmes novels, Brissman also worked as a translator. With Lily Chia Brissman, he translated and edited A Woman Soldier's Own Story: The Autobiography of Xie Bingying, bringing the Chinese writer's memoir to English-language readers. It is a very different project from a Holmes pastiche, but it shows the same interest in voice, history, and lives shaped by upheaval.

His best-known fiction starts with The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes, then continues with Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter, Sherlock Holmes and the Swedish Enigma, and Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein's Diary. These books take Conan Doyle's detective out of Baker Street's usual era and drop him into modern Britain, where he works alongside journalist James Wilson. Readers who warm to them usually like the central hook, a revived Holmes facing phones, hackers, and present-day politics, while still solving puzzles in a very old-fashioned way.

They are Holmes adventures with a built-in culture shock.

Outside the page, Brissman has said he has lived in England, Spain, and eleven U.S. states, and that he now lives in Wisconsin. He has also mentioned hobbies that fit the picture of a quietly busy life, cycling, bread baking, piano improvisation, and tennis. None of that feels out of place. His books suggest someone who likes craft, rhythm, and long stretches of attention.

There is still a little mystery around him, which feels appropriate for a writer using a pen name and borrowing the world's most famous detective. But the outline is clear enough. Barry Grant's fiction grows out of a childhood split between farm country and a grandfather's library, and out of an adult life that has made room for travel, languages, and old stories that still have some life left in them.