Bonnie MacBird

WITH the January gloom in full swing you might expect Bonnie MacBird to be rather regretting swapping California for a new life in Marylebone.

But the Emmy-winning writer – who wrote the screenplay to the original Hollywood hit Tron – said she is loving life writing Sherlock Holmes novels just a stone’s throw away from 221b Baker Street.

Now living in Chiltern Street, she is just about to publish her seventh novel inspired by the Arthur Conan Doyle classics.

Ms MacBird told me: “My interest in Sherlock began when I was a schoolgirl in California and my mother used to take me to the library and I would take as many books out as I was allowed. I remember it was a beautiful Carnegie library – and I got through all 56 short stories. I absolutely inhaled them.

“I’ve reread them ever since. And I love all the movies too, and keep returning to them.”
What’s all the fuss about?

“I have a weakness for smart men,” she said. “He is so smart. He uses his gift to right wrongs. He is the first superhero in fiction. He doesn’t have magical powers, but his powers are, let’s say, beyond the norm. But he isn’t socially adept.

“I come from the movie end of things and lots of people have called Conan Doyle’s writing cinematic. Most of it predated cinema, but he is so visual and so succinct. His works read more like a movie than other writers of that time. Nobody can beat Conan Doyle.”

After college, Ms MacBird got a story editor position at Universal Studios, but left to write the science fiction movie Tron. Ahead of its time in 1981, the film’s hero is abducted into a digital world and forced to participate in a series of games to escape.

Ms MacBird said: “I got a technical consultant for that script who had done some seminal research. I got a tour of his stuff, and hired him. He’s now my husband [Alan Kay]. He was one of the futurists, really of the time, and so we all saw a lot of that [artificial intelligence] coming for a long time. In my opinion, the stuff that has been released to the public too early, and without the protections built in. Creative people are up in arms about this.

“To put it bluntly: we wanted AI so that AI would do the grunt work, but instead the AI is doing the creative work. We are all aghast.”

Since moving perman­ently in the summer, she has already joined the Hampstead Players, based at St Stephen’s Church, and played the Nurse in the theatre troupe’s Christmas production of Romeo and Juliet.

She said she was also enjoying living in a build­ing that backs onto a for­mer Victorian workhouse, now Westminster Univer­sity. “Things were simpler back then in certain ways,” she said. “I do enjoy living in that time when I am writing. Living in a Vic­tor­ian building, it’s got a certain scenic beauty.”

On her new area, she added: “I first stayed in the Holmes Hotel because I thought it would be kitschy, but then I fell in love with this part of the city and knew I wanted to live here full time. You have everything you need in walking distance. Coming from California, LA, where you have to drive everywhere, you don’t have the luxury of the public transportation you have here.”

Ms MacBird is a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society and has lectured for the group. Her The Serpent Under: Treachery, Twists and Terror in Baker Street, published by Harper Collins and featuring scenes in the London Zoo reptile house and the Serpentine, has won rave reviews.