Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes. However there were many other detective stories being written at that time.
He is an excellent detective and a bad man. As one of the cases states - often enabled him to profit himself far beyond the extent to which his clients intended. He has no problem taking advantage of his clients and what he learns. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)



Regular readers will remember that last fall, I became a huge fan of a 1970s BBC television series called The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes which just recently came out on DVD for the first time, a compendium of hour-long TV movies based on the actual Victorian detective stories being published in London's penny dreadfuls at the same time as Arthur Conan Doyle's work, almost all of which have fallen into unheard-of obscurity 125 years later. In particular I ended up really loving the episodes based on a character named Horace Dorrington by Arthur Morrison, collected into a single 1897 volume called The Dorrington Deed-Box that is so obscure that not even Project Gutenberg carries it; ah, but it turns out that it is one of the fabled million titles that Google Books has now scanned and added to their massive library, which I recently downloaded in EPUB form and transferred to my Sony Reader e-ink device*, and which I got to read while out at the cafes just like any other book in existence. Excelsior! Behold the glorious modern world in which we live! The future is now, brave cyber adventurers! Enter the matrix and gleam the cube and so forth!

And in fact, all of my fellow Baker Street Irregulars are sure to get a big kick out of the Dorrington stories, precisely because he's essentially the anti-Sherlock Holmes; penned by a literal former East End orphan (the poverty-stricken feral children of Victorian London who Charles Dickens so often wrote about), Morrison's private detective is actually quite the cunning sociopath himself, solving crimes not for any noble purpose but so he can then squeeze the criminals for blackmail money (and eventually turning them in anyway, so that his reputation as an investigator is secure), unafraid to bump off said criminals when they're unwilling to play along. It's a darkly delightful book, full of the same kinds of complex capers as any Doyle volume but without any of the Lawful Good moralizing or sermons, and it makes me realize just what a wide breadth of detective fiction used to exist in the late Victorian period, nearly all of it besides a handful of characters now completely forgotten by the public at large. It comes highly recommended, and in fact with its public-domain status could easily serve as the starting point for a whole series of brand-new tales, for any genre authors out there stuck these days for inspiration.

Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for fans of Victorian detective fiction

*And for those who are curious, by the way, it's only the title page and illustrations that are presented as scanned images in Google EPUB books, like you're seeing in the above photo; the actual body of the work is instead presented as contemporary computer text, so as to be resizable and reflowable just like any other electronic book. ( )