Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus—but it was not always so. Taking stock of a rich tradition, this anthology of pioneering sleuths includes Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget," plus Charles Dickens's "The Detective Police," Wilkie Collins's "Mr. Policeman and the Cook," E.W. Hornung's "Gentlemen and Players," Baroness Orczy's "The Ninescore Mystery," and excerpts from longer works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Gaston Leroux, and R. Austin Freeman. In their introductory remarks, Graeme Davis and Leslie Klinger trace the early history of literary detection, a genre which Conan Doyle perfected but by no means invented.