Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective ever created. The supremely rational sleuth and his dependable companion, Dr Watson, will forever be associated with the gaslit and smog-filled streets of late nineteenth and early twentieth century London.
Yet Holmes and Watson were not the only ones solving mysterious crimes and foiling the plans of villainous masterminds in Victorian and Edwardian England. The years between 1890 and 1914 were a golden age for English magazines and most of them published crime and detective fiction. The startling success of the Holmes stories that appeared in The Strand magazine spawned countless imitators. This volume highlights some of those 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes'.
In the fifteen tales which Nick Rennison has brought together in this anthology, readers can meet:
MARTIN HEWITT – the lawyer-turned-detective whose adventures appeared in the Strand, the magazine which published many of Conan Doyle's short stories, and were illustrated by Sydney Paget, the artist who created the most iconic images of Sherlock Holmes
THE OLD MAN IN THE CORNER – Baroness Orczy, creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, also published several volumes of short stories featuring a nondescript old man who never seems to stir from his corner table in a London tea-shop but none the less solves crimes that have defeated Scotland Yard's finest
DR THORNDYKE – forensic investigator who makes use of his arcane medical and legal knowledge to shed light on the darkest of murder mysteries
ROMNEY PRINGLE – gentleman-criminal at large in Edwardian London whose adventures on both sides of the law are recorded in short stories by Clifford Ashdown
ADDINGTON PEACE – detective-hero of a sequence of short stories written by Fletcher Robinson whom some literary scholars claim as the real inventor of the Hound of the Baskervilles
THE THINKING MACHINE - Jacques Futrelle's dazzlingly intellectual genius Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, aka the Thinking Machine, even more capable than Holmes himself of solving the most baffling of mysteries through brainpower alone
CARNACKI THE GHOST FINDER – detective of the occult created by the legendary horror writer William Hope Hodgson, author of The House on the Borderlands
It may well be true that there never has been and never will be a detective quite like Sherlock Holmes but he did not stand alone. He did have his rivals and, as this collection of short stories shows, many of their adventures were as exciting and entertaining as those of the master himself.
