Classic Detective Stories Free Online: Sherlock Holmes and 11 Forgotten Mysteries
The detective story is barely older than the light bulb. Poe invented it in 1841, Doyle made it a mass form in 1887, and by 1920 the machinery was so well understood that dozens of series writers were turning out competent mysteries for children on an industrial schedule. Most of that middle layer has vanished, not because it was bad but because nobody reprinted it.
Twelve are free to read in the library. Two are famous, one is a masterpiece pretending to be a crime novel, and the rest are the interesting archaeology.
Start with the two Holmes novels
- A Study in Scarlet — the first Holmes, 1887, and worth reading specifically for the introduction: Watson meeting a man who deduces his war service from his tan is still the best opening in the genre. Be warned that the middle third abandons London entirely for a long flashback to Utah, which is where most first-time readers stall. Skip it if you want; the frame story resumes intact.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles — 1902, written after Doyle had killed Holmes and been forced to bring him back, and much the better book. Holmes is offstage for most of it, which turns out to be the reason it works: Watson alone on the moor is genuinely frightening, and the atmosphere does what the deduction cannot.
Read Hound first if you have never read either. Scarlet is the historically important one; Hound is the one that will make you want more.
The girl detectives
Long before Nancy Drew, a run of series writers had worked out that a resourceful girl investigating something was a commercially excellent idea. These are the direct ancestors.
- The Dragon's Secret — Augusta Huiell Seaman, and the best of this group by a distance. Seaman wrote real mysteries with real clues for girl readers, on a Jersey shore setting she knew, and the plotting is tighter than the boys' series managed.
- Patty's Friends — Carolyn Wells, who also wrote adult detective novels, so she knew the form. This is lighter — a treasure hunt in London — but competently constructed.
- The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay — a syndicate series, and fascinating as social history: girls with their own automobile and boat in 1914, solving things, with the technology as much the point as the mystery.
- Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach — boarding-school series crossed with mystery, which was the standard commercial formula.
The boy detectives and the technology mysteries
The boys' equivalent had a distinctive obsession: every new machine got a mystery series attached to it within about two years.
- The Motor Pirate — 1903, and genuinely ahead of its time. The villain's advantage is simply that his car is faster than anything else on the road, which in 1903 was a science-fiction premise.
- Radio Boys Loyalty; Or, Bill Brown Listens In — a kidnapping solved by amateur radio, from the years when a boy with a homemade set really could intercept things.
- On the Edge of the Arctic; Or, An Aeroplane in Snowland — the aviation version of the same idea.
- The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters — Edward S. Ellis, coastal Maine, motorboats and smuggling.
- The Black Wolf Pack — Daniel Carter Beard, who founded the Boy Scouts of America, so the woodcraft is authentic and the mystery is mostly a delivery mechanism for it.
- The mystery of the missing eyebrows — a small, odd, cheerful book, and the best title on this page.
Two by writers better known for something else
- Colonel Thorndyke's Secret — G. A. Henty, who wrote a hundred military adventure novels, trying a cursed-diamond mystery instead. Not his natural form, but interesting for exactly that reason. His actual specialism is covered in G. A. Henty books by period.
- Timothy Crump's Ward and Dan, the Newsboy — Horatio Alger doing crime plots. Alger's usual machine is poverty-to-respectability; here it runs on kidnapping and counterfeiting, which suits him better than it should. More at Horatio Alger books free online.
And one that will ruin the others for you
- Crime and Punishment — catalogued as a detective story, which is not wrong and is very funny. Dostoevsky gives you the murderer in the first fifty pages and then spends six hundred more on the only question the genre normally refuses to ask, which is what it is actually like to have done it. Porfiry Petrovich is a great detective in a book that does not care about detection. Read it after the Holmes, and expect to find the mysteries thin afterwards.
The honest recommendation
If you want a good mystery, read The Hound of the Baskervilles and then Dragon's Secret. If you want to see how a genre gets built, read the technology series in date order and watch each new invention become a plot device. And if you want to see the genre broken open from inside, read the Dostoevsky.
For the adjacent shelf of Victorian dread rather than deduction, try gothic classics to read free online, and the full detective and mystery shelf is browsable in one place.