Weary of the Sherlock Homes stories and anxious to get on with what he considered his more important writing, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his famous Baker Street detective in December 1893. Readers protested and publidy mourned; thousands canceled their subscriptions to the Strand Magazine, the publisher of the Holmes stories, and a decade later Holmes returned, not dead after all. In the interim, however, in what can be seen as formative years in the history of detective literature, Holmes's successors and imitators appeared.One of the most important and successful of these was Martin Hewitt, the creation of Arthur Morrison-journalist, chronicler of London's slums, and, in the years following Holmes's "death," a popular writer of detective fiction.

Morrison was a reticent man whose life is as obscure as his work is unjustly neglected. So little is known about him that P. J. Keating, the most informative writer about Morrison...