Lauren Steinhauer

I have always been a storyteller. During my youth, I would place my fellow students into a light hypnotic trance and tell a horror story, placing them into the scenes. My first published writings were for the famous Dummies series, three works in all for a program called Director, an animation application. Though they were non-fiction, I wrote in a voice very much like a novel in the manner of Mickey Spillane or Dashiell Hammett. With my fourth literary attempt, Sherlock Holmes Lost Adventure: The True Story of the Giant Rats of Sumatra, self-published by iUniverse, I wrote in the manner of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, lending extra credence to the work. The novel won Honorable Mention for fiction in DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Book Awards, which celebrates the success of independent authors and publishers and is part of the annual DIY Book Festival held in Los Angeles and New York. Some of my reviews include “[Steinhauer has] produced a breathlessly exciting short novel that involves Holmes and Watson with an evil genius whose accomplishments dwarf those of ex-Professor Moriarty,” explained Roger Johnson from The District Messenger: The Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. “…And of course there are those giant rats — yes, rats in the plural. It’s a heady mixture, and it would make a grand movie.” And then there is the extraordinary email from author Ray Bradbury: “Thank you very much for your good letter and kind words, but especially for this fantastic copy of Sherlock Holmes Lost Adventure.” I have since written a novel about the relationship between Felix Kersten, a therapist, and the infamous Heinrich Himmler of the Nazi SS.