McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective

Description

Edinburgh has provided the backdrop to stories of detection for almost a century and a half. In the 1860s, a few years before Conan Doyle began his medical studies at Edinburgh University, there appeared a hugely popular series of books with titles including Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh, The Sliding Scale of Life and The Disclosures of a Detective. They were all the work of one James McLevy, an Edinburgh policeman. Now largely forgotten, McLevy was one of the first exponents of the crime genre and a likely influence on the creator of Sherlock Holmes.