The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

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’.

From the 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, to November Joe, the Canadian woodsman who uses his extraordinary powers of observation to track down villains and bring them to justice, this collection of short stories will show that many of Sherlock Holmes’ rivals adventures were as exciting and entertaining as those of the master himself.