Hugh Ashton was born in the UK in 1956. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, he worked in a variety of jobs, including security guard, publisher's assistant, and running an independent record label, before coming to rest in the field of information technology, where he assisted perplexed users of computers and wrote explanations to guide them through the problems they encountered. A long-standing interest in Japan led him to emigrate to that country in 1988, where he has remained ever since; writing instruction manuals for a variety of consumer products, assisting with IT-related projects at banks and financial institutions, and researching and writing industry reports on the Japanese and Asian financial industries. Some of the knowledge he has gained in these fields formed the background for At the Sharpe End, his second novel. He has published volumes of Sherlock Holmes mysteries with Inknbeans Press of California: Tales from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD, More from the Deed Box of John H. Watson MD, Secrets from the Deed Box of John H Watson MD, The Darlington Substitution, Notes from the Dispatch-Box of John H. Watson MD, Further Notes from the Dispatch-Box of John H. Watson MD, The Death of Cardinal Tosca, The Reigate Poisoning Case: Concluded, and Without My Boswell; all in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The three "Deed Box" collections have been collected and printed together in a handsome hardback edition - The Deed Box of John H. Watson MD.Inknbeans has also published his collection of short stories set in Japan, Tales of Old Japanese, featuring the culture and habits of the older generation of Japanese, as well as the children's detective stories, illustrated by Andy Boerger, entitled Sherlock Ferret and the Missing Necklace, Sherlock Ferret and the Multiplying Masterpieces, and Sherlock Ferret and the Poisoned Pond.His first published novel, Beneath Gray Skies, is an alternative history set in a "past that never happened", where the Civil War was never fought. His second novel, At the Sharpe End, features an expatriate consultant living in Tokyo, Kenneth Sharpe, who finds himself thrust into a world of violence and high finance that takes him by surprise. This has been re-published by Inknbeans Press together with eerily prophetic extracts from a first draft, describing a Japanese earthquake and resulting nuclear accident.His third novel, Red Wheels Turning, takes some of the characters of Beneath Gray Skies, and sets them in the background of Tsarist Russia, where a battle of wits takes place to control the secret Russian wonder weapons that could win the war for the Allies. Hugh currently lives with his wife Yoshiko in the old town of Kamakura to the south of Tokyo, where he is working on future novels and stories.