The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossusbut it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poes French detective Dupin, the hero of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, anticipated Holmes deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his tales of ratiocination". In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poeand to mile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If Rue Morgue was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Two books by Wilkie CollinsThe Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)are often given that honour, with the latter showing many of the features that came to identify the genre: a locked-room murder in an English country house; bungling local detectives outmatched by a brilliant amateur detective; a large cast of suspects and a plethora of red herrings; and a final twist before the truth is revealed. Others point to Mary Elizabeth Braddons The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and others still to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862-3) by the pseudonymous Charles Felix". As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden agesof hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called cosy murders in Britainthe legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the otherbut even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterised the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured in these pages.