Davis makes some excellent ancillary choices ... The baseline reality of all books like The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes is both sobering and challenging: there are no real rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The closest approximations, an egotistical Belgian sleuth and a little old lady with a mind like a bacon slicer, are comfortably distant second-placers, and the various problem-solvers Davis assembles here don’t even come close. But they make for all the more intriguing reading because of that, and the picks here are good. The biting little irony of the book is that finishing it will create a near-irresistible urge to read a Holmes story, or more than one, but such an indulgence can only be improved by a bit more context.
Holmes authority Leslie S. Klinger opens the anthology with a generous background essay, after which Davis reprints a variety of excellent stories ... My recommendation: Buy any and every collection you see titled The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes..
While Davis’ collection offers the pleasure of undiscovered countries, it also reaffirms that the Master is still the Master. The earliest tales show a pace too slow and a syntax too elaborate for modern tastes ... Things perk up as the twentieth century gets going, and the focus on reading a pattern in the physical world strengthens ... Still, Doyle’s magnetic personalities are missing, and this collection will likely be of mostly historical interest.
... a welcome addition to early English detective fiction anthologies ... solid entries will also be new to many ... Davis’s decision to excerpt novels doesn’t always work: The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Phantom of the Opera creator Gaston Leroux doesn’t deserve to be spoiled by a section from its denouement. Nonetheless, this quality compilation belongs on the shelf with such volumes as In the Shadow of Agatha Christie: Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Female Authors, 1850–1917.
Seventeen stories, originally published between 1837 and 1913, test the sweeping assertion by editor Davis that the period constituted 'the mystery story’s first golden age' ... The results are less than consistently convincing ... The excerpts from novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Felix, and Emile Gaboriau are nothing more than efficient ways of allowing fans to skip the books from which they’re taken, and reprinting the climactic chapter from Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room provides major spoilers for one of the seminal locked-room novels ... The audience most likely to enjoy the whole enterprise consists of those willing to overlook the claims that Holmes had any truly successful rivals and that his career coincided with a golden age. Bronze, maybe.
