Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes whetted the public's taste for detective fiction, and their extraordinary popularity encouraged numerous writers working in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to follow in Doyle's footsteps. The *Rivals of Sherlock Holmes* features forty detective tales by writers from Great Britain, America, and the European continent that inspired, or were inspired by, Doyle's tales of the Great Detective. Its selections include: Distinguished Predecessors - Detective tales from the pre-Sherlockian era by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Emile Gaboriau, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Rivals from the Commonwealth - Stories featuring pretenders to the throne of Sherlock Holmes, including Ernest Bramah's blind detective Max Carrados, G. K. Chesterton's priest detective Father Brown, and R. Austin Freeman's forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke. American Rivals - Stories of rival detectives from "across the pond," among them Arthur B. Reeve's scientific detective Craig Kennedy, Melville Davisson Post's pre-Civil War detective Uncle Abner, and Jacques Futrelle's S. F. X. Van Dusen, a.k.a. "The Thinking Machine."