Tim Symonds was born in London, England, and grew up in Somerset, Dorset and the Channel Island of Guernsey, off the coast of Normandy. After spending his late teens farming in the Kenya Highlands and driving bulldozers along the Zambezi River, he moved to California and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA with an honours degree in Political Science.

He and his partner Lesley Abdela live in the High Weald of Sussex, where the events recounted in his first novel ‘Sherlock Holmes and The Dead Boer at Scotney Castle’ took place. Not long afterwards, ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Bulgarian Codex’ (MX Publishing 2012), takes Holmes and Watson into the very depths of the Balkans in 1900. Holmes and Watson were back in the region – Serbia – in ‘Sherlock Holmes And The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter’ (MX Publishing 2014), and not long afterwards the peripatetic pair go to ‘Stamboul’ to investigate a plot against the despotic Sultan, in ‘Sherlock Holmes And The Sword of Osman’ (MX Publishing 2015).

Holmes and Watson again take their lives in their hands in foreign parts in Tim Symonds’ fifth novel, to be published in late 2016, set in Peking as the once-mighty Ch’ing Dynasty crumbles into warring factions and murderous plots.

Tim is or has been a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the British Association of Victorian Studies, the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society, and the Chartered Institute of Journalists.