Crime Files

The Successors to Sherlock Holmes

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This book examines the developments in British detective fiction which took place in the seven years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. In December 1893, only six years after Holmes’s first appearance, when he had been the Strand Magazine’s biggest selling point for just two years, and at the height of his popularity with the Victorian reading public, Sherlock’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, killed him off. In 1900, Doyle decided to resurrect Holmes, once again in the pages of Strand. This book examines works by six popular late-Victorian authors or authorial partnerships — L.T. Meade; C.L. Pirkis; Arthur Morrison; Fergus Hume; Richard Marsh; Kate and Vernon Hesketh Prichard — whose collections reveal the astonishing generic breadth and diversity of the late-Victorian detective series in the years following Holmes’s demise. By introducing readers to an array of fascinating detectives, British Detective Fiction 1893-1900 explores how these stories engage with social and political concerns, including developments in modern technology, and illuminate the mechanics of late-Victorian authorship and the literary marketplace.