Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes whetted the public's taste for detective fiction and their extraordinary popularity inspired numerous writers working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to follow in Doyle's footsteps. Rivals of Sherlock Holmes collects forty detective tales that influenced or were influenced by Doyle's tales of the Great Detective. Its contents include:

• Distinguished Predecessors: Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and others that broke ground for the detective story.
• Rivals from the Commonwealth: English and Canadian detectives, including Ernest Bramah's blind detective Max Carrados and G. K. Chesterton's crime-solving priest Father Brown.
• American Rivals: Rival detectives from across the pond, among them Jacques Futrelle's August S. F. X. Van Dusen (better known as The Thinking Machine) and Melville Davison Post's historical detective Uncle Abner.
• The Female of the Species: Lady sleuths in stories by Wilkie Collins, Richard Marsh, Anna Katherine Green, and others.
• Sherlockian Satires and Homages: Respectful and comic riffs on Sherlock Holmes and his methods by O. Henry, Bret Harte, and others.

Rivals of Sherlock Holmesalso features an Introduction by Sherlockian scholar Leslie S. Klinger.