Books by Alan Lance Andersen

In the 1800s, a number of Victorian and Edwardian writers began writing detective mystery stories - for this was the era when Arthur Conan Doyle was creating Sherlock Holmes tales on a regular basis. Modern authors have attempted to recapture the mystique of Conan Doyle's adventures by writing "new" Holmes stories; yet these attempts frequently fail to capture the original flavor, because 2013 writers simply don't think or speak like Victorians. Conan Doyle's contemporaries wrote about characters of their own invention; nevertheless they sound more like Conan Doyle than do any of his deliberate modern imitators. One of the more successful of these "period" writers was Sax Rohmer. Now in 2012, both Sax Rohmer's stories and the Conan Doyle canon are all in the public domain. Thus it is now possible to present ... Sax Rohmer's version of Sherlock Holmes. NOTICE: This book is a pastiche prepared entirely from Public Domain sources. No Copyrighted Materials were used in this project.

The Mad Tea Party and Other Festival Skits offers schools and small theatre groups an opportunity to stage short humorous scripts that have been produced at Renaissance Faires and street festivals around Iowa and the Midwest. Alice in Wonderland was written for British readers in the 19th Century, and there are a number of things that modern Americans need to know if they are to capture the book's full wit and flavour. In The Mad Tea Party, author Lewis Carroll attempts to remedy the problem by inviting the fictional Alice and some of her mad friends from Wonderland to re-create the notorious tea party while he attempts to explain a few of his little inside jokes -- with unexpected results when his own characters don't exactly go along with the plan. Oliver's Birthday Picnic brings to the festival stage a number of beloved characters from the Golden Age of Comedy, including Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; Barcelona is an offbeat medieval adaptation of the old Vaudeville favorite "Slowly I Turned."