Barry Grant is a pseudonym for the author Barry Grant Brissman. Grant's work is known for its unique and unusual take on the classic fictional character Sherlock Holmes. In Grant's novels, Holmes is taken out of his historical setting and placed in the twenty-first century, where he must confront a new set of mysteries.
Barry Grant had a childhood filled with diverse experiences that shaped his love for literature and travel. At the age of eleven, he embarked on a journey from Chicago to his uncles' farm in North Dakota for the summer. This marked the beginning of an annual tradition that lasted until he graduated from high school. These early journeys to North Dakota instilled in him a deep appreciation for the prairies, loneliness, big skies, and agriculture. From the other side of his family, Grant inherited a love for higher culture. During holiday visits to his grandmother's house in Moline, Illinois, he discovered his deceased grandfather's extensive library, which housed a vast collection of books, including works by Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Poe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, Burns, and Conan Doyle.
In addition to his Sherlock Holmes novels, Grant has also co-authored a translation from Chinese, "A Woman Soldier's Own Story: the Autobiography of Xie Bingying," which was published by Columbia University Press in 2001 and by Berkley Books in 2003. Grant has lived in various parts of the world, including England, Spain, and eleven different states in the United States, before settling in Wisconsin. He has a variety of hobbies, including cycling, bread baking, piano improvisation, and tennis.