The Baker Street Boys - The Case of the Stolen Sparklers (12 page)
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Authors: Anthony Read
Hatton Garden has been London’s centre for diamond trading and jewellery making for several centuries. Many dealers still trade small packets of diamonds on the street. Some of them are Hasidic Jews from Europe, who dress in black coats and wide-brimmed hats like those in our story.
Although it is now a busy street lined with jeweller’s shops, the area was originally a garden on the edge of the City of London, given by Queen Elizabeth I to one of her favourites, a rich merchant called Sir Christopher Hatton, in 1581.
Bleeding Heart Yard is a real place in the centre of Hatton Garden. It is a small, quiet square, with a famous restaurant in one corner. Legend has it that the name comes from the bloody murder of Elizabeth Hatton, the beautiful wife of Sir Christopher’s son. The story goes that on the morning of 26 January 1621, after a grand ball in nearby Hatton House, her body was found lying on the cobbles of the square, murdered by a spurned lover. Her heart had been torn out but was still pumping blood onto the stones.
Anthony Read studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and was an actor-manager at the age of eighteen. He worked in advertising, journalism and publishing and as a television producer before becoming a full-time writer. Anthony has more than two hundred screen credits to his name, for programmes that include
Sherlock Holmes
,
The Professionals
and
Doctor Who
. He has also written non-fiction, and won the Wingate Literary Prize for
Kristallnacht
.
The Baker Street Boys books,
The Case of the Disappearing Detective
,
The Case of the Captive Clairvoyant
,
The Case of the Ranjipur Ruby
and
The Case of the Limehouse Laundry
, are based on Anthony’s original television series for children, broadcast by the BBC in the 1980s, for which he won the Writers’ Guild TV Award. The series was inspired by references to the “Baker Street Irregulars”, a group of young crime-solvers who helped the detective Sherlock Holmes in the classic stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Other Baker Street Boys adventures:
The Case of the Disappearing Detective
The Case of the Captive Clairvoyant
The Case of the Ranjipur Ruby
The Case of the Limehouse Laundry
The Case of the Haunted Horrors
The Case of the Racehorse Ringer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
First published 2008 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
This edition published 2012
Text © 2008 Anthony Read
Illustrations © 2008 David Frankland
The right of Anthony Read and David Frankland to be identified as author and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-4241-3 (ePub)