The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : the greatest detective stories: 1837-1914
(Book)

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 Lecoq debuted in France Twenty years earlier. ... This collection presents seventeen tales representing all three eras: those who may have inspired Holmes, those who took advantage of his absence, and those who fought him for readers in the pages of "The Strand" and other popular magazines -- Jacket flap.