Official Site of Award-Winning Author Gretchen Altabef
Italian publisher Mondadori will be publishing an Italian language version of Sherlock Holmes These Scattered Houses in their Il Giallo Mondadori 2022-2023 Sherlock Holmes series. This is a great honor. I am excited that my Italian American Marcello family will be speaking Italian in these books! Of course so will Holmes and the unique villain… Continue reading Stupendo! Splendido! Exciting news!
“It is one of the greatest accomplishments of an author to inspire his reader’s imagination. We can read the same story and because of the miracle of our uniqueness it lights up our imaginations differently.” Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were at the fire, smoking their post dinner pipes. Holmes opened a thin green-backed journal… Continue reading Doyle’s Posthumous Joke* or Holmes & Watson on Censorship
There's something deep inside people that responds to Holmes. He has a genuine sense of natural justice. A sense of honor. People wish that he did exist. They feel somehow that society would be a safer place if he did. He is what we would like our leaders to be. Someone whom you trust who… Continue reading Happy 172 Birthday Sherlock Holmes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7F427fR09k&list=PLF43-tHWPFEixp8RJb91wjRddPjhhthqL Recorded December 10, 2020 I awoke in the morning and the planetree greeted me covered in new spring buds outside the window of my old familiar bedroom. I took a breath, and his horrible first pipe filled my heart with gratitude. Today I wasn’t alone – Sherlock Holmes was back! Last night we poached… Continue reading PODCAST – Remarkable Power of Stimulus Book Launch & Author Reading
"We discover what Watson did during Holmes’ hiatus and how it made him even more the partner of Sherlock Holmes. Their solving of the murders involves these two gentlemen in a dangerous chain of events . . . Only Holmes’ unshakable belief in logic, imagination, and truth, can make the difference." My local newspaper, the… Continue reading Bucks County Herald Article
When I was a young teenager in love growing up along the Hudson River in New York, my adventurous boyfriend, surprised me one Halloween night with a trip to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. He was more aware than I of the wealth of history around us. My gaze led me away to the Algonquin Round Table, the London of… Continue reading Halloween Horseman
“Time and time again, generations have shown that they need Holmes. Something in his assured blend of omniscience and infinite tenacity, humanized with intriguing character flaws speaks deeply to our need for solutions to the problems of our own very different world today. We watch him and the faithful Watson our reliable narrator descend the… Continue reading Holmes Unabridged
“Dr. Joseph Bell…was indeed so wise a counsellor, had so level a head, and so perfect a temper, that it was impossible to take offense at anything he said. Moreover, he had a fund of humor which was not so much a fund as an inspiration.”––Lord Stormonth-Darling. Dr. Joe Bell’s biography by Ely Liebow, has… Continue reading Dr. Joe Bell & Sherlock Holmes
What he did with what he was given, to me is proof that our life choices may not always be what we originally intended. Sometimes it seems like nothing we planned is going right. How could our plans fail? The inspiration for Sherlock Holmes was Dr. Joe Bell and other literary personages. He had the… Continue reading Look Around
Along with being the birth of our nation, in my family, the forth of July has always been the celebration of my sculptor uncle, Octavio Mastrovito, better known as the man who built the golden statue of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center in New York. He also named me Gretchen. And I have always felt the… Continue reading Uncle Otto’s Prometheus
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