William C. Honeyman was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1845 to Thomas and Eliza Honeyman, who had emigrated from Scotland four years earlier. He was the grandson of minor Scottish poet and songwriter, Adam Crawford. Honeyman returned to Britain with his mother and three siblings in 1849.
He was a violinist and orchestra leader who, under his real name, published violin instructional books such as How to Play the Violin and However, he was much better known in his own time under his pseudonym, James McGovan (or James M"Govan), a writer of police detective novels. Readers did not initially realise the works were fiction, but assumed they were true stories in the vein of James McLevy. McGovan"s stories were so highly regarded in his own time, that an 1888 Publishers’ Circular “proclaimed McGovan’s articles ‘the best detective stories (true stories, we esteem them) that we ever met with.’” Historians believe Edinburgh resident Arthur Conan Doyle was aware of and influenced by McGowan"s tales and went on to publish his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887.
