Sherlock Sam’s new American adventure

SINGAPORE — Local children’s book series Sherlock Sam will be taking on a new adventure in the United States — its first three titles are slated to be released by well-known publisher Andrews McMeel Publishing from mid-2016.

Known for publishing the book collections of notable comic strips such as The Far Side, Calvin And Hobbes and Get Fuzzy, Andrews McMeel Publishing also has an AMP! Comics for Kids line, under which the Sherlock Sam titles will be released.

The series, which follows the adventures of 10-year-old Samuel Tan Cher Lock, aka “Singapore’s greatest kid detective”, and his sidekick robot named Watson, was created by the husband-and-wife team of Adan Jimenez and Felicia Low-Jimenez, who publish under the moniker A J Low, and is illustrated by Andrew Tan, who goes by the moniker drewscape.

Managed in Singapore by Epigram Books, this is the first Singapore children’s fiction series to be released in the US market.

“We are very proud of A J Low for bringing Sherlock Sam into the US. It gives the local literature community-at-large much hope, and we see Sherlock Sam’s new ‘adventure’ in America as a milestone for Singapore-based stories to gain international awareness,” said Epigram publisher Edmund Wee in a media release.

“We are very excited to be published by Andrews McMeel and are proud to share the things we love about Singapore with new readers,” said the couple.

Since it was released in 2012, the series has sold more than 24,000 copies to date.

The first two titles — Sherlock Sam And The Missing Heirloom In Katong and Sherlock Sam And The Ghostly Moans In Fort Canning — will be published in the US simultaneously next June, while Sherlock Sam And The Sinister Letters In Bras Basah will come out in 2017.

In all, there have been nine Sherlock Sam titles, with all but one of them set in Singapore. (The last one was set in Japan.)

The Sherlock Sam coup is the latest achievement for Epigram, whose popular titles include The Diary Of Amos Lee series and the graphic novel The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Recently, it also bestowed the award for the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize to author O Thiam Chin for his novel The Infinite Sea.