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The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Private Detectives & Other Miscreants)

kevinburtonsmith

We can go around and around all night about who the first fictional “private detective” was, but most of us, I think, will agree that Sherlock Holmes was the first significant fictional detective — his 1887 debut was a literary shot heard ’round the world that still reverberates over a hundred and thirty years later.

Holmes called himself a “consulting detective,” and yes, he took money to invesigate crimes on behalf of private citizens, on a freelance basis. To deny his very real influence on almost every fictional detective, private, public and amateur that followed would be mere folly. The infuriatingly rational sleuth and his faithful companion and narrator, Dr Watson, are a part of us now, forever associated in the public imagination with deerstalker caps, magnifying glasses, and hansom cabs wending their way through the gaslit streets and eternal fog of late nineteenth (and early twentieth century) London.

But the staggering success of Holmes and Watson pretty much guaranteed that they were not the only fictional private detectives chasing down clues and bringing villains to justice. They had plenty of rivals, from the ridiculous to the sublime; some still read today, and some who have slipped through the cracks of time, most deservedly. But not all.

Some of them were blatant ripoffs; others openly stressed how different they were from Holmes, emphasizing how ordinary and down to earth they were, or how much more peculiar and eccentric than Holmes they were. Gimmicks abounded. Some were women, some were even American. Most were private detectives of one sort or another, but a few were police officers or amateur sleuths.

In 1970, Hugh Greene (Graeme’s older brother) released an anthology of Victorian and Edwardian mystery stories that were published back in the day, and called it The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, reintroducing readers to many long-forgotten sleuths. The book’s success inspired an ITV television series of the same name, which dramatized several of the stories, and prompted Greene to release three similarly themed collections: Cosmopolitain Crimes: The Foreign Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971), The Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1973) and The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1978).

The name stuck, and there have since been several anthologies since  titled The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, edited respectively by Alan K. Russell, Graeme Davis, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Nick Rennison. Not surprising, really, since all these stories are in the public domain.

THE RIVALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE ANTHOLOGIES

  

You’d think Rivals of Sherlock Holmes was a franchise or something, but it’s not. Besides collecting a bunch of public domain stories featuring various contemporary competitors of Holmes, and slapping “Rivals of Sherlock Holmes” on the cover, most of these anthologies have absolutely no connection with each other at all. They boast different editors and publishers and offer different commentary (if any at all), although many of the same stories are repeated over and over (and over). Even the art work is often depressingly generic, rubber-stamped with a profile of Holmes. You’d think these guys could at least come up with a more original title.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION


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