"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" are Edgar Allan Poe's pioneering detective stories. Poe's Dupin character and the unnamed friend who narrates the stones present parallels to Holmes and Watson.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde, the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, is, like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, concerned with human psychology and the role of science in society.

Oscar Wilde's controversial 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is often seen as the bible of the late-Victorian aesthetic and decadent philosophy.

Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula, although concerned more with supernatural rather than rational phenomena, portrays in its characters' hunt for the vampire Dracula detective work that rivals Holmes's own.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle's short Holmes novel published in 1902, in which Holmes, with the help of the devoted Watson, investigates an unexplained...