The glory of the great Sherlock Holmes has not faded in more than a hundred years. However, of all the brilliant literary detectives of the Victorian era, we know only him. Meanwhile, he had many worthy rivals. Popular English and American magazines were literally flooded with fascinating detective stories that became fashionable at the turn of the century. A dazzling constellation of crime writers has entertained millions of readers on two continents. This book presents the best detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle's contemporaries, previously unknown to the Russian public. The collection is illustrated with drawings from magazines of the 19th and early 20th centuries and is equipped with a glossary in pictures. From the preface to the book: There is not a single story about Holmes in this anthology. Perhaps the reader will not find a single familiar name in it at all. Almost all the stories were translated into Russian for the first time; other authors are firmly forgotten even in their homeland. But once they were all famous, and the public anxiously awaited the next issue of a thick illustrated magazine - Strand or Idler - to learn about new investigations of the Old Man in the Corner or the shrewd detective Lovedie Brooke. The varied and bizarre world of the Victorian detective is almost gone into oblivion - only a few colorful figures remained on the surface: Dickens' Inspector Bucket, Willkie Collins' detective Cuff and, of course, Sherlock Holmes, who eclipsed everyone. However, Conan Doyle had predecessors, imitators, associates and rivals - we owe them all the emergence and flourishing of the detective story genre. As luck would have it, they are all people of unusual fate, their biographies sometimes resemble an adventure novel; and therefore each short story is preceded by a short story about its author. In addition, the book contains two essays: one about the emergence and development of detective literature, the other about how detective work was organized in reality in England and America.