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.