Books : The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

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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 19th- and early 20th-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, most of which published crime and detective fiction. The startling sucess of the Holmes stories that appeared in The Strand magazine spawned countless imitators. This volume highlights some of those 'rivals' of Sherlock Holmes. The 15 tales in this anthology introduce readers to such sleuths as lawyer-turned-detective Martin Hewitt; the old man in the corner who solves crimes that defeated Scotland Yard's finest, by the creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel; forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke; Jacques Futrelle's dazzlingly intellectual genius, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, aka the Thinking Machine; and Carnacki the Ghost Finder, the detective of the occult, created by legendary horror writer William Hope Hodgson. It may well be true that there never has been and never will be a detective quite like Sherlock Holmes, but as this collection shows, he stood far from alone.