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The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
- The Greatest Detective Stories: 1837-1914
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Maxwell Caulfield, Gabrielle de Cuir, Alex Hyde-White, John Lee, Jim Meskimen, Stefan Rudnicki, full cast
- Length: 18 hrs and 30 mins
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The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
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Summary
This masterful collection of 17 classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction.
Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus - but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, preceded Holmes’s deductive reasoning by more than 40 years with his “tales of ratiocination.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe - and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France 20 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 Collins - The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) - are often given that honor, 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 Braddon’s 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 ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the 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 other - but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Ian Witham
- 05-04-23
A curate's egg.
A bishop asked a curate if he was enjoying his egg. Supposedly, he replied, "Parts of it are excellent, my lord."
If you did not need me to explain that joke, then this is the book for you. It is a book for those of you who like books written by people who were there. It begins with a long rambling essay about Victorian crime fiction that the people who will enjoy this book do not need. We know that. Get on with it.
The first story is set in Enfield. I lived in Enfield for more than forty years. It is about an heiress who was held prisoner in a private insane asylum in Enfield Chase. If you wanted to hide a same woman in a lunatic asylum, Enfield Chase was a good place to choose. He says it became a workhouse for the surrounding parishes and there was a workhouse in Enfield Chase that took children from the surrounding parishes.
It seems to have been a much nicer place than the one in Oliver Twist. His contemporaries criticised Dickens for laying on the misery with a trowel but modern writers think that is how it was in all workhouse at all times. They slavishly copy the few Victorian writers they have heard of.
I would have given it four stars if it had not included extracts from longer works. I might have given it five of some of the pronunciations seemed odd. I don't think Victorian Englishmen and women pronounced that word like that.
Some stories are great. Lady Molly is a believably arrogant but charming feminist in a man's world. The Doctor Thorndike story is another highlight. Some not so good. The ones set in France are like bad episodes of 'Allo 'Allo. Some have too many words, a common fault of Victorian writers.
One writer said there were were one or two men. That was a phrase often used by Victorian writers and it has annoyed me for more than forty years.
Were there one or two men?
If there were lots of men there, you might say there were ten or twenty men there. You would say there were one or two hundred but I think most of us can tell the difference between one man and two.
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