Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

The big one!

Sherlock Holmes has been in the public domain for decades but as far as I know there is NO OTHER eBook of his collected adventures as good as this one. All of the others have unwanted supplementary material. Or are not properly formatted. Or are missing the (few, but important) illustrations. It was reading a Sherlock Holmes eBook that finally convinced me to start making my own. I paid about 70 pence for that eBook and as far as I'm concerned, that was 70 pence too much.

All Sherlock Holmes stories by Mr Doyle are included, and any by anyone else have been chucked of course. The .zip file includes .epub for most e-readers, .azw3 for Kindles and a gigantic .mobi file (well, it is 660,000 words) that I find works well with Kindle for PC. Click here to get the link for your .zip file, download it, then when you see it in your 'Downloads' folder, right-click on it and select 'Extract All'. After that, they're yours to use however you like! Just don't sell them, cos that defeats the whole point of this exercise.

Jezebel by Justin Hamlin

"Jenny Anderson; fifteen, attending grammar school, looking to avenge the murder of her best friend by the local serial killer.

JEZEBEL; a demon with a bad case of amnesia - and she's possessing Jenny. Two girls sharing the same body...

Follow Jezebel and Jenny from the nuclear-blasted wasteland of Nevada to the sweaty dancefloor of Apres Moi nightclub, from the bitching of the schoolyard to the ruined houses and Mayan temples where young men are sacrificed, towards the bunkers and torture chambers of the demonic conspiracy and possible revenge and redemption.

Brutal, gripping, horrific and blackly funny - dare you read Jezebel?"

I considered the Samurai to be a more 'commercial' novel, but Jezebel is the one I'm most proud of. Even though some of the sadistic violence may cause some readers to give up in disgust. I always make sure to put my characters through the wringer - like life, there are victories and defeats, and strivings against incredible odds. The other possible point that might put people off is that it's narrated by a female demon. A spirit that possesses people (female people, in the case of Jezebel) and causes them to do bad things. Some folks are scared of that stuff.

The reason I'm proud of Jezebel because it is original. If anyone else has written a novel like this, it's news to me. Admittedly, there is one sentence ("Now I know who I am") that comes from Ray Bradbury's excellent short story 'The One Who Waits'. I've sort of homaged Ray by calling a minor character after him, although as far as I know nobody's picked up on either point.

Jezebel is available on Smashwords, although if you have a Kindle device, I would recommend the British, U.S. American, Canadian or Australian Amazon websites.

The Samurai of Gosford Green by Justin Hamlin

"The life of a Samurai – serving your master, bringing honour to your estate and expelling the barbarians – has never been easy. Especially not when Social Services have placed you in Gosford Green, one of Britain’s bleakest council housing facilities.

But why should this warrior be daunted? After all, the Green is an estate in dire need of regaining its honour. Apprentices must be trained, battles must be fought and if the barbarians refuse to accept expulsion, they’ll have to be dealt with in other, more permanent ways...

The traditions of Yukio Mishima and British ‘kitchen sink’ drama meet explosively and unforgettably in Justin Hamlin’s debut novel THE SAMURAI OF GOSFORD GREEN."

First published for Kindle on Amazon in 2013 in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States, Canada and Australia, this has recently become available for other e-readers thanks to the fine folk of Smashwords. 

There is a real place called Gosford Green in Coventry which I was unaware of when I wrote this. I've never been there, but from what I can tell it has little if anything in common with the fictional version. Still, I'm keeping the name because I like the resonance. By the way, in case anyone was wondering, that is Sgurr nan Gillean on the cover.

Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard

This is the one I tried submitting to 'Free eBooks' but they butchered the formatting, which led me to try it on my own blog instead.

Robert E. Howard wasn't the highest-quality writer in the world but he sure was entertaining, and as far as I'm concerned that's what matters most. He was also prolific; there's a staggering 334,000 words in here along with the (anachronistic) picture of the Sutton Hoo mask on the cover. Unfortunately, I can't include 'The God in the Bowl', 'The Black Stranger' or 'The Vale of Lost Women' in editions available outside the U.K, due to copyright reasons. However, if you want the complete version, get in contact and I'll happily email you one. If you've got a U.K. email address, of course.

The rest of the stories are all in chronological order according to Dale Rippke, whom I would like to thank for working that out, along with Project Gutenberg for making the text available. Naturally, anything not by Robert E. Howard has been omitted.

Go here to get the .zip file, When you download it, it will appear in your 'Downloads' folder. When you see the 'zipped' folder, right-click on it and select 'Extract all'. You'll get an .azw3 file, an .epub file and a large .mobi file. I find the .azw3 best for my Kindle device and the .mobi best for Kindle for PC. Most other e-readers prefer .epub files. You, of course can use them however you like.

I've made this as well-presented and as easy to navigate as I can, with a proper linked contents page, chapter stops etc. Mind the extra Contents page though. Damn.

Dogmeat by Justin Hamlin

And here's one of my own. By coincidence, the name of the dog on the front cover is 'Raffles'.

This is a collection of short stories I wrote between 1992 and 2014. As you might imagine, I had to polish the earlier ones up a bit. I try to deliver value, so there's 95,000 words in here - about the same length as an average-sized print novel, and considerably more than the average-sized eBook - spread among 30 stories.

The official blurb for this book reads "What is DOGMEAT? It's a young boy crouched trembling in a closet, waiting for the moment to stab a raging hooligan... it's a giant homeless simpleton, accompanied everywhere by the mysterious 'Kenny', searching frantically for refuge... it's macho transvestites nearing the end of their shift, aiming to hit the town in style... it's the Shankill Jedi Boys out marching with their lambeg drums and their light-sabres, hoping for a ruck... it's a biker gang attempting to cope with their leader being the reincarnation of a depraved Roman Emperor... it can only be a collection of Justin Hamlin stories! All the above and twenty-five others are to be found in DOGMEAT. You've never read anything like it."

What can I say, a man's got to promote himself. And on a further positive note, it doesn't have any zombies in it. And it's not post-apocalyptic. And there aren't any shopping scenes. And no one grows up agonizing over not being able to get laid. Well, not much anyway.

This is published on SmashWords for just four US dollars, although if you've got a Kindle device and come from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the USA, Canada or Australia it's probably better to go to Amazon instead. Both Smashwords and Amazon offer sampling, so you can try-before-you-buy. Oh, what am I saying? Just buy the bloody thing...

Raffles by E. W. Hornung

Arthur John Raffles - cricketer, man-about-town... and burglar.

E. W. Hornung wrote twenty-six short stories and one novel concerning this fascinating character. The short stories were published in three volumes, the first of which was dedicated to his brother-in-law - Arthur Conan Doyle, who did, of course, write the Sherlock Holmes stories. Raffles was intended as an inversion of Holmes, although Doyle did consider making the villain the hero to be somewhat 'dangerous'.

A number of other writers have also written stories about Raffles. I have, of course, completely ignored such work and chosen instead to focus on that of the real author. The contents of the four volumes have been re-arranged into chronological order, as much as myself and the blog Crossroads of the Curious can ascertain. I am also grateful to Project Gutenberg for making the text available.

Anyway, here is the .zip file. When you download it, it will appear in your 'Downloads' folder. When you see it, right-click on it and select 'Extract all'. You'll get an .azw3 file, an .epub file and a large .mobi file. I find the .azw3 best for my Kindle device and the .mobi best for Kindle for PC. Most other e-readers prefer .epub files. You, of course can use them however you like.

I've made this as well-presented and as easy to navigate as I can, with a proper linked contents page, chapter stops etc. Still, there's an extra contents page at the end of the book - a side-effect of the 'Calibre' program. Hope that doesn't bother you too much.

Good morning!

Good morning to anyone who's reading.

I am Citizen Justin, known in real life as Justin Hamlin from Tunbridge Wells, England. I am a writer of both novels and short stories, and I also publish free eBooks of works in the public domain. This blog was started in order to publicise both of these.

MY OWN WORKS: I try to produce an eBook of my own every year or two. They're full-length novel-sized, av. 100,000 words, and I try to make them original and unique. Currently, they're on sale from Smashwords (and those it sells to, such as Barnes and Noble) and Amazon (if you have a Kindle e-reader, I advise you buy from Amazon). They cost four US dollars, or the rough equivalent.

PUBLIC DOMAIN: Too many eBooks of public domain works are improperly formatted and thus difficult to read. Or they contain spam. Sometimes, there might be promotion of another author's own work in there. For this reason, I prefer to create my own eBooks using text downloaded from sources such as Project Gutenberg. I won't promote my own work in these books, and I won't charge for them either - they're free, can be downloaded from this blog and re-distributed however you like.

Enjoy.