Leslie S. Klinger (born May 2, 1946, Chicago, Illinois) is an American attorney and writer. He is a noted literary editor and annotator of classic mystery fiction, including the Sherlock Holmes stories and the novel Dracula.
He is the editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a three book edition of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction with extensive annotations, "hailed as the definitive exegesis of Holmes and his times;" the book won an Edgar Award. He also edited the scholarly ten-volume Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, a heavily annotated edition of the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, and The New Annotated Dracula, an annotated version of Bram Stoker's novel. He published two collections of classic fiction in 2011, In the Shadow of Dracula and In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, both from IDW. In 2011, he co-edited with Laurie R. King The Grand Game, a two-volume collection of classical Sherlockian scholarship, published by The Baker Street Irregulars, and A Study in Sherlock, a collection of stories by all-star writers inspired by the Sherlock Holmes tales (Random House). The first two volumes of The Annotated Sandman, a four-volume edition of Neil Gaiman's award-winning The Sandman (Vertigo) comics, for DC Comics, appeared in 2012; the balance will be published in 2014. Klinger is also completing The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft for W. W. Norton, a massive illustrated collection of heavily-annotated stories, scheduled for publication in October 2014.
Klinger has also contributed introductions to numerous books of mystery and horror, written book reviews for the Los Angeles Times and other periodicals, and contributed an essay on vampires and sex, called Love Bites, to Playboy. He served as a consultant on the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey, Jr. and on the sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, released in 2011.
Klinger is a member of the Sherlock Holmes literary club called The Baker Street Irregulars, as well as numerous other Sherlockian societies. He served three terms as chapter president of the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. He is a member of Sisters in Crime, the Horror Writers Association (and currently serves as the Treasurer of HWA), the Dracula Society, and the Transylvanian Society of Dracula.
He was the general editor of a number of books published by the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), including the Manuscript Series, and is currently the general editor of the BSI's History Series. He has lectured frequently on Holmes, Dracula, and the Victorian world and has taught a number of courses for UCLA Extension on Sherlock Holmes. He also taught a course on "Dracula and His World" for UCLA Extension in November 2009.
In February 2013, Klinger filed a lawsuit against the Conan Doyle Estate, who demanded a hefty license fee for the use of the Sherlock Holmes characters in a collection of stories In the Company of Sherlock Holmes. The book contains no content from any copyrighted Sherlock Holmes stories, therefore Klinger is accusing the estate of committing copyfraud. Klinger asks the court of Illinios to confirm the public domain status of Sherlock Holmes in the United States, since only ten of Conan Doyle's sixty stories are still under copyright and the definitive story elements (such as Holmes's bohemian habits, deductive reasoning and many supporting characters) were fully established in the public domain stories, and Klinger states that this is reason enough to allow anybody to use the characters freely in new fiction.