The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

The Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes was the third of Hugh Greene’s anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian crime stories. This time it’s crime in the countryside. And once more Greene has found some wonderful little stories. There are several women detectives, including M. McD Bodkin Q. C.’s pistol-packing Dora Myrl and Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee, a child who solves a mystery (in The Man Who Cut off My Hair) with her lip-reading skills. Marsh was the author of one of the strangest of Victorian gothic mystery novels, The Beetle, and this story has some of the same interesting weirdness as that novel. There are a number of tales of intrigue and espionage, including the truly bizarre but highly diverting and action-filled A Race with the Sun by L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax. Jacques Futrelle’s The Mystery of Room 666 is a splendid tale of madness and murder told by a madman. Arthur Morrison contributes a couple of typically well-crafted stories. Ernest Bramah’s The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage boasts both a delightfully convoluted plot and a very dark tone. There are only a couple of relatively weak stories and they’re still by no means bad stories (like Fergus Hume’s The Amber Beads). Overall this is a wonderfully entertaining collection and I recommend it highly.9780140038910