Sherlock Holmes remains the most famous of all fictional detectives. But he was not the only solver of crimes to patrol the gaslit streets of late Victorian and Edwardian London. The years between 1890 and 1914 were the heyday of the English (and American) story magazines and their pages were filled with platoons of private detectives, police officers and eccentric criminologists.
These were the 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' and this second anthology of stories edited by Nick Rennison, author of Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography, highlights fifteen of them:
Mr Booth created by Herbert Keen
Max Carrados created by Ernest Bramah
Florence Cusack created by LT Meade and Robert Eustace
John Dollar, 'The Crime Doctor' created by EW Hornung
Dick Donovan created by JE Preston Muddock
Horace Dorrington created by Arthur Morrison
Martin Hewitt created by Arthur Morrison
Judith Lee created by Richard Marsh
Madelyn Mack created by Hugh Cosgro Weir
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard created by Baroness Orczy
Addington Peace created by Fletcher Robinson
Mark Poignand and Kala Persad created by Headon Hill
John Pym created by David Christie Murray
Christopher Quarles created by Percy Brebner
John Thorndyke created by R Austin Freeman
عن المؤلف
NICK RENNISON is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He is the editor of six anthologies of short stories for No Exit Press: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Rivals of Dracula, Supernatural Sherlocks, More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock's Sisters and American Sherlocks, plus A Short History of Polar Exploration, Peter Mark Roget: A Biography, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Robin Hood: Myth, History & Culture and Bohemian London, published by Oldcastle Books. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His crime novels, Carver's Quest and Carver's Truth, both set in nineteenth-century London, are published by Corvus. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.