The Journal
Books like Sherlock Holmes: classic mysteries and detectives
Sherlock Holmes established the template for detective fiction: a brilliant, eccentric investigator, a less-brilliant companion who reflects the reader's bewilderment, a mystery that yields to pure logical analysis, and a revelation that reframes everything the reader thought they understood. If you want more of that combination, these are the best places to find it in the classical tradition.
More Conan Doyle: the novels#
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the best short story collection and the place to start if you came to Holmes through the novels. For the specific stories to read first and in what order, the best Sherlock Holmes stories to read first covers the full ranking.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is Doyle's best long-form Holmes -- a Gothic atmosphere that the short stories do not have and a mystery that holds up completely. If you have only read the short stories, this is the novel to read next.
For Golden Age detective fiction#
Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is not in the public domain but is the single most important post-Holmes detective novel -- the book that extended the form's formal possibilities in a direction nobody had considered and that most readers find genuinely shocking on a first read. Christie's Hercule Poirot is the closest successor to Holmes as a detective type.
G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories (1911 onward) feature a small, unassuming Catholic priest who solves crimes through moral psychology rather than physical observation. The first collection, The Innocence of Father Brown, is available free at Project Gutenberg. Father Brown is the inversion of Holmes -- where Holmes privileges rational observation, Brown privileges the intuition of what people are capable of.
For Victorian detective fiction before Holmes#
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859) is the most important detective novel written before Holmes existed. It uses an epistolary structure -- multiple narrators contributing their accounts -- and a mystery that unfolds through documents rather than deduction. Collins invented several of the conventions that Doyle would later codify. The novel is not in the public domain but is widely available.
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) is widely considered the first English detective novel in the strict sense -- a stolen jewel, multiple suspects, a detective who uses proto-scientific methods. T.S. Eliot called it the first, the longest, and the best of English detective novels.
For something darker#
Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories -- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844) -- invented the detective story as a form. C. Auguste Dupin is the direct model for Holmes: brilliant, eccentric, contemptuous of official police methods. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is not a detective story in the strict sense but shares Holmes's interest in the hidden life of respectable men and the investigation of what lies beneath the surface. Free on Foxing.
Further reading#
For the biography of Doyle and what his personal life was actually like, the real Arthur Conan Doyle behind Sherlock Holmes covers the full story.
For the gothic tradition that detective fiction partly shares, the best gothic novels in the public domain includes several titles that cross between the two genres.