Michael Sims

Michael Sims is the editor of The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories.

From his Q & A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:

How did you come to be such a voracious reader?

I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian, and I raced into both as if they were doorways to another world. And each week my teacher would unpack our box of mail-ordered Scholastic Book Club paperbacks—books such as The Great Whales and Mystery of the Haunted Hut. No Christmas will ever top the weekly anticipation of watching from my desk as the teacher took handfuls of books out of the box and matched them with their order slips and called out our names.

What about Victorian-era writing appeals to you?

Primarily the sense of texture and detail and atmosphere, as well as the feeling that you are in a world far enough away from our own to be exotic and close enough to be familiar.

Describe your approach to making selections for this volume.

The challenge for me in editing an anthology is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue