Michael Mallory (born 1955) is a writer on the subjects of animation and post-war pop culture, and the author of the books X-Men: The Characters and Their Universe, Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of HorrorThe Science Fiction Universe and Beyond, and Essential Horror Movies. As an animation and film historian he has written over 600 articles, frequently for Variety, the Los Angeles Times and Animation Magazine , and has been featured in documentaries and DVD extras about animation. He co-authored the memoirs of animation legend Iwao Takamoto, which were published in 2009 as Iwao Takamoto: My Life with a Thousand Characters. He has also written the script for the annual Annie Awards ceremony, the Oscars of the animation industry, since the mid-1990s.
Mallory was born in Port Huron, Michigan, and was raised in Pontiac, Michigan. As a teenager he appeared in summer stock plays with the Kenley Players and went on to receive a degree in Speech, with a theatre/broadcasting emphasis, from Drury College (now Drury University) in Springfield, Missouri. After a stint as a radio newscaster in Springfield he relocated to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. He made numerous appearances on the local stage and played bit roles in films such as Frances , Staying Alive and Eleanor: First Lady of the World (all 1982) and on television in Days of Our Lives , Santa Barbara and General Hospital , as well as a handful of commercials and industrial films. More recently he has appeared on Mad Men , Vegas , and Mob City , in which he played Abe "Greenie" Greenberg, whose murder propels the plot of the series, Angie Tribeca , and NCIS . In the late 1980s Mallory made writing his primary pursuit and for a while he served as a writer for Disneyland and other theme park venues. He scripted the large-format, 3-D attraction film Haunts of the Olde Country , which premiered at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1993 and played there for several years. His 2009 book Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror, a history of Universal horror film series, earned an honorable mention from the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards, and Marvel: The Expanding Universe Wall Chart took the Silver 2009 Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Reviews. He lives with his wife in Glendale, California.
Mallory also writes murder mysteries, often featuring "Amelia Watson", [1] the second (and previously unheralded) wife of Dr. Watson of Sherlock Holmes fame. Five volumes of Amelia Watson stories have appeared to date: the 2000 collection The Adventures of the Second Mrs. Watson, the 2004 novel Murder in the Bath, a second collection, The Exploits of the Second Mrs. Watson, published in 2008, a novel The Stratford Conspiracy, published in 2012, and a third collection, The Other Mrs. Watson, published in 2016 in England. A second series featuring Hollywood-based detective Dave Beauchamp began in 2013 with the novel Kill the Mother!. The most recent Dave Beauchamp adventure is Dig That Crazy Sphinx!, published in 2022. Mallory has written more than 180 short stories for adults and children, including a series of mysteries starring an eleven-year-old sleuth named "Scotty," which appeared periodically in the Los Angeles Times. He was the creator and co-editor (with Lisa Seidman and Rochelle Krich) of the mystery anthology Murder on Sunset Boulevard , which was published through the auspices of the Los Angeles chapter of the national organization, Sisters in Crime, and also co-edited (with Harley Jane Kozak and Nathan Walpow) its follow-up, LAndmarked for Murder . He was among the first recipients of a Derringer Award, winning in 1998 for Best Flash (short-short) Mystery Story, and his story "What the Cat Dragged In" was included in The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best American Mystery Stories, 2023, edited by Amor Towles and Otto Penzler. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times, for both fiction and nonfiction.
Mallory has written horror stories for both young readers and adults. His novella Night Shocker was published in 1997 by Baronet Books as part of their "FrightTime" series, a string of books along the lines of the then-popular Goosebumps series. He contributed more short horror tales for kids for the "Chiller" page of the website MysteryNet.com. In 2012, he came out with his first horror novel for adults, The Mural , which is published by Borgo Press. A second horror thriller, The Book of Diagom was published under the pseudonym Gordon Turcott, but Mallory retained his original byline for The Ambulance .
Mallory has written more than 600 magazine, newspaper, and online articles about film, animation, and pop culture, for publications such as The Los Angeles Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Animation Magazine, Mystery Scene, and scores of others.
A Study in Scarlet is an 1887 detective novel by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle. The story marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would become the most famous detective duo in English literature. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes, a consulting detective, to his friend and chronicler Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story's murder investigation as his "study in scarlet": "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
Murder by Decree is a 1979 mystery thriller film directed by Bob Clark. It features the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who are embroiled in the investigation surrounding the real-life 1888 Whitechapel murders committed by "Jack the Ripper". Christopher Plummer plays Holmes and James Mason plays Watson. Though it features a similar premise, it is somewhat different in tone and result to A Study in Terror. It is loosely based on The Ripper File by Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. is a 1974 novel by American writer Nicholas Meyer. It is written as a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and was made into a film of the same name in 1976.
The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a fictional giant rat, first mentioned by Arthur Conan Doyle in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire". As part of the tale, the protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, declares that there is a "story" connected with this rat, presumably a detective case he has handled. The name of the rat and its implied unpublished history were later used in works by many other writers.
Iwao Takamoto was a Japanese-American animator, television producer, and film director. He began his career as a production and character designer for Walt Disney Animation Studios films such as Cinderella (1950), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). Later, he moved to Hanna-Barbera Productions, where he designed a great majority of the characters, including Scooby-Doo and Astro, and eventually became a director and producer.
Colonel Sebastian Moran is a fictional character in the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. An enemy of Sherlock Holmes, he first appears in the 1903 short story "The Adventure of the Empty House". Holmes once described him as "the second most dangerous man in London", the most dangerous being Professor Moriarty, Moran's employer.
The Scarlet Claw is a 1944 American mystery thriller film based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Directed by Roy William Neill and starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, it is the eighth film of the Rathbone/Bruce series. David Stuart Davies notes on the film's DVD audio commentary that it's generally considered by critics and fans of the series to be the best of the twelve Holmes films made by Universal.
The stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have been very popular as adaptations for the stage, and later film, and still later television. The four volumes of the Universal Sherlock Holmes (1995) compiled by Ronald B. De Waal lists over 25,000 Holmes-related productions and products. They include the original writings, "together with the translations of these tales into sixty-three languages, plus Braille and shorthand, the writings about the Writings or higher criticism, writings about Sherlockians and their societies, memorials and memorabilia, games, puzzles and quizzes, phonograph records, audio and video tapes, compact discs, laser discs, ballets, films, musicals, operettas, oratorios, plays, radio and television programs, parodies and pastiches, children's books, cartoons, comics, and a multitude of other items — from advertisements to wine — that have accumulated throughout the world on the two most famous characters in literature."
Sherlock Holmes has long been a popular character for pastiche, Holmes-related work by authors and creators other than Arthur Conan Doyle. Their works can be grouped into four broad categories:
Many writers make references to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous literary creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes, and these often become embedded within popular culture. While Holmes exists predominantly in the context of Victorian-era London, he has been mentioned in such outre contexts as the 22nd century or hunting aliens or supernatural enemies. These references are in addition to the innumerable passing references to Sherlock Holmes made in many literary and cinematic works, such as the labeling of a person as a "Sherlock", whether in reference to their intelligence.
The Spider Woman is a 1943 mystery film starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, the seventh of fourteen such films the pair were involved in. As with all of the Universal Studios films in the series, the film is set in then-present day as opposed to the Victorian setting of the original stories. This film incorporates elements from the 1890 novel The Sign of the Four, as well as the short stories "The Final Problem", "The Adventure of the Empty House", "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and makes explicit reference to "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot".
Stuart Palmer was a mystery novelist and screenwriter. He was most famous for creating the character Hildegarde Withers. In addition, he used the pen names Theodore Orchards and Jay Stewart. for some of his works.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is a 2002 television adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 novel of the same name.
The character of Count Dracula from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, has remained popular over the years, and many forms of media have adopted the character in various forms. In their book Dracula in Visual Media, authors John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart declared that no other horror character or vampire has been emulated more times than Count Dracula. Most variations of Dracula across film, comics, television and documentaries predominantly explore the character of Dracula as he was first portrayed in film, with only a few adapting Stoker's original narrative more closely. These including borrowing the look of Count Dracula in both the Universal's series of Dracula and Hammer's series of Dracula, including the character's clothing, mannerisms, physical features, hair style and his motivations such as wanting to be in a home away from Europe.
Charles August "Nick" Nichols was an American animator and film director, who worked in animation for over 50 years at Walt Disney Animation Studios and Hanna-Barbera. At Disney, he worked on various short subjects and films from the 1940s into the 1950s, including the Academy Award-winning short Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953). Nichols co-directed Charlotte's Web (1973) while at Hanna-Barbera.
Leslie S. Klinger is an American attorney and writer. He is a noted literary editor and annotator of classic genre fiction, including the Sherlock Holmes stories and the novels Dracula, Frankenstein, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics, Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's graphic novel Watchmen, the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
John H. Watson, known as Dr. Watson, is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Along with Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson first appeared in the novel A Study in Scarlet (1887). "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" (1927) is the last work of Doyle featuring Watson and Holmes, although their last appearance in the canonical timeline is in "His Last Bow" (1917).
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel by Nick Rennison, originally published in 2005.
In Agatha Christie's mystery novels, several characters cross over different sagas, creating a fictional universe in which most of her stories are set. This article has one table to summarize the novels with characters who occur in other Christie novels; the table is titled Crossovers by Christie. There is brief mention of characters crossing over in adaptations of the novels. Her publications, both novels and short stories, are then listed by main detective, in order of publication. Some stories or novels authorised by the estate of Agatha Christie, using the characters she created, and written long after Agatha Christie died, are included in the lists.