Sherlock Holmes is the lead character in just one of many wonderful Victorian detective stories. The twist is that Klimo’s alter-ego is gentleman burglar Simon Carne, a master of disguise who has travelled to England from India to profit from the wealth collected in the imperial metropolis for the Queen’s jubilee celebrations. Working from his Park Lane mansion, his clients include the cream of London society who consult him when their jewels or paintings are stolen. Guy Boothby’s collection of six short crime stories follows the adventures of Detective Klimo, the most talked-about detective in London. This is a thrillingly chaotic and unsettling portrait of a late-Victorian London pervaded by greed and crime. Throughout his adventures, he lies to, steals from, poisons, blackmails and attempts to kill various clients and criminals. In this collection of short stories, Arthur Morrison’s Horace Dorrington takes this notion to its furthest extreme.ĭorrington is a charming East End criminal with a very successful private detective business in the prosperous West End of the Victorian metropolis.
Sherlock Holmes often asserted that he would have made “a highly efficient criminal”. Pirkis’s gendered twist on the Victorian detective genre sees Brooke’s “female methods” -– such as gossip and gaining the trust of servants -– trouncing those of her male contemporaries and exonerating wrongly-suspected women. Appearing more than 25 years before female detectives were officially employed by the Metropolitan Police, private investigator Brooke is frequently asked by the police to assist with cases where a “feminine” perspective is required. Loveday Brooke is the first female detective created by a female author (Catherine Louisa Pirkis). The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894) A vast (and largely uncharted) treasure trove of detective stories was published in periodicals, newspapers and magazines between 18, as Holmes rivals, clones and parodies emerged to fill the great detective’s deerstalker hat and cape. Meanwhile, the editors of The Strand and its rival magazines clamoured to crown a fitting heir to Holmes.įor fans of Doyle’s detective stories, the good news is that they found dozens of detectives to take his place. Some 20,000 Strand readers are reported to have cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine. I’ve never found any evidence to support apocryphal stories of city clerks wearing black armbands after Sherlock’s death, but the public were unhappy with Holmes’ early departure. Authors are not always the best judges of their own work. He considered his detective fiction a lower stratum of literary achievement and felt that with Holmes out of the way, he could capitalise on his celebrity and attract an audience for his long historical novels.
His body was not recovered.Īt the time of the story’s publication, Doyle firmly believed that this would be the last of Holmes.
In The Final Problem, published in The Strand magazine, Sherlock plunged over the Reichenbach Falls in a struggle with master criminal Professor Moriarty and both were swallowed by a cauldron of swirling water and seething foam. In December 1893, just six years after his first appearance and at the height of his popularity with the late-Victorian reading public, Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most famous fictional detective, was killed off by his creator Arthur Conan Doyle.