Can there be more than one Great Detective?

What if Sherlock Holmes wasn’t alone? That is the premise of Sherlock Holmes and the Great Detectives, the latest collection of short stories from Belanger Books, which has just been launched on Kickstarter.

While Sherlock Holmes is the best remembered detective from the Victorian and Edwardian periods, there was a rich plethora of other sleuths solving crimes throughout the world at the same time. The contributors to this collection have imagined what might happen if these sleuths worked together to fight crime and stop master criminals.

For my story, The Stanforth Mystery, I have chosen to feature ‘The Old Man in the Corner’ from the mysteries written by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (best known as the creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel). I have always enjoyed her stories about this enigmatic detective. He solves crimes that have baffled the police simply based on the reports that he reads in the newspapers and then explains the solutions to his ‘Watson’, the journalist Polly Burton, as they sit together in a London tearoom. What will he make of the latest exploits of Sherlock Holmes recounted in the Strand Magazine?

Sherlock Holmes and the Great Detectives is available to pre-order at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/belangerbooks/sherlock-holmes-and-the-great-detectives in hardback, paperback or electronic formats, until 3 May 2020. The project was funded within the first few hours and the book is due to be published in June 2020.