E. W. Hornung

The best mysteries--whether detective, historical, police procedural, cozy, or comedy--have one thing in common: a memorable perpetrator. For every Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade in noble pursuit, there's a Count Dracula, a Lester Leith, or a Jimmy Valentine. These are the rogues and villains who haunt our imaginations--and who often have more in common with their heroic counterparts than we might expect. Now, for the first time ever, Otto Penzler gathers...

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," anticipated Holmes's deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his "tales of ratiocination." In "A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes's adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur...