Kriminalnoveller.

This masterful collection of seventeen 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 Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” anticipated Holmes’ deductive reasoning by more than forty years. 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 twenty 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. Among the possibilities are two books by Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)—Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and 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—hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted “cozy” murders in Britain—and 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 in these pages.

After Arthur Conan Doyle created the detective, Sherlock Holmes, many writers borrowed him to be the hero of their stories. The anthology offers a selection, old and new.

THE STORY: The world's greatest detective has seemingly reached the end of his remarkable career when a case presents itself that is too tempting to ignore: The King of Bohemia is about to be blackmailed by a notorious photograph, and the woman at the hea

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager—and one of the most gifted reporters and storytellers of his generation—comes a “horrifying, hilarious, and outlandish” (Entertainment Weekly) collection of gripping true crime mysteries about people whose obsessions propel them into unfathomable and often deadly circumstances. "[Grann is] one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine Whether David Grann is investigating a mysterious murder, tracking a chameleon-like con artist, or hunting an elusive giant squid, he has proven to be a superb storyteller. In The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, Grann takes the reader around the world, revealing a gallery of rogues and heroes with their own particular fixations who show that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!

“Donald Thomas is the all-time best at Sherlockian pastiche.” —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine In a momentous period of British history, Donald Thomas’s latest Sherlock Holmes adventure pits the Great Detective and his faithful biographer, Dr. John Watson, against an international conspiracy led by a disgraced English officer. Colonel Hunter Moran bears upon him “The Mark of the Beast”; his satanic ingenuity leaves a spectacular trail of devastation. It runs from the annihilation of a British armored column by Zulu tribesmen armed only with shields and spears, to a life-and-death struggle on the sinking passenger steamer Comtesse de Flandre. The heir to the French empire lies dead in the African dust. Europe is brought to the brink of war by forged dispatches, designed to enrich gun-runners and assassins. The gold-fields and diamond mines of South Africa become the playground of organized crime. Only the detective genius of Holmes can prove a match for the unfolding criminality of Moran and his associates. WithWatson and Mycroft at his side, Sherlock Holmes again demonstrates that although the powers of the state and the underworld may try to overpower him, they will never out-think his splendid analytical mind at the height of its powers.

Having killed off Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began a new series of tales on a very different theme. Brigadier Gerard is an officer in Napoleon's army—ecklessly brave, engagingly openhearted, and unshakable, if not a little absurd, in his devotion to the enigmatic Emperor. The Brigadier's wonderful comic adventures, long established in the affections of Conan Doyle's admirers as second only to those of the incomparable Holmes, are sure to find new devotees among the ardent fans of such writers as Patrick O'Brian and George MacDonald Fraser.