10 Books That Are Similar To Sherlock Holmes Books

There was one figure in particular who played to the curiosity in all things enigmatic and macabre long before real crime was the mega-genre that it is today: Sherlock Holmes. The brilliant detective and his dependable colleague Dr. Watson are two of the most well-known literature characters. The whole Sherlock collection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle includes four novels and 56 short tales that are regarded as canonical Holmes works. However, Doyle originally wrote about Sherlock in 1887, a plethora of films, TV series, and books have been produced as a result of his stories. Here are 10 books that are similar to Sherlock Holmes books that you must read.

Murder On The Orient Express By Agatha Christie

The most famous murder mystery by Agatha Christie is Murder On The Orient Express. A snowdrift blocks the Orient Express just after midnight. For this time of year, the opulent train is unexpectedly packed, yet by morning, there is one less person on board. An American businessman who had been stabbed a dozen times lies dead in his compartment with a sealed door from the inside. Detective Hercule Poirot must find the culprit because they are alone and he or she may decide to commit another killing.

The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot appears in the detective novel Murder on the Orient Express by English author Agatha Christie. The Collins Crime Club released it for the first time on January 1st, 1934 in the UK. Murder in the Calais Coach was the title given to the publication in the United States on February 28, 1934 by Dodd, Mead & Company. Heavy snowfall halts the Orient Express, an exquisite train from the 1930s. When a murder is uncovered, Poirot’s flight from the Middle East to London is delayed as he investigates. The novel’s first few chapters are set in Istanbul. The last chapters of the book are set in Yugoslavia, where a train is caught between Vinkovci and Brod.

Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie By Alan Bradley

Alan Bradley wrote a mystery titled The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie in 2009. Flavia de Luce, an 11-year-old amateur sleuth who musters the courage to leave her beloved chemical lab in order to clear her father in a murder inquiry, stars in the 1950s English countryside mystery. After receiving the 2007 Debut Dagger Award and selling the publishing rights in three nations based on the first chapter and a synopsis, first-time novelist Bradley began writing the book. The first book of a ten-volume series is well-liked by critics as a classic mystery with an iconic protagonist. It has garnered numerous accolades. In Buckshaw, the family’s country manor house located in the English village of Bishop’s Lacey, Flavia Sabina de Luce plots retribution against her two elder sisters, Ophelia and Daphne who had confined her within a closet when the book begins.

Flavia is a regular 11-year-old girl with braces and pigtails, but she is also a brilliant home-based amateur chemist with a specialty in poisons and a fully furnished lab on the top floor of her house. She steals her oldest sister’s lipstick, adds poison ivy extract, and then waits, anxiously anticipating changes in Ophelia’s complexion. She has her scientific notepad at the ready. Because she is the only one of the three sisters, at the age of 17, who remembers their free-spirited mother Harriet, who vanished on a mountaineering expedition in Tibet ten years earlier and is assumed dead, Flavia is especially envious of her older sister. Colonel Haviland “Jacko” de Luce, their father who spends much of his time studying his stamp collection and is an avid philatelist and previous amateur illusionist, was distraught by Harriet’s abduction. As Buckshaw’s gardener, Arthur Wellesley Dogger, a devoted servant who had saved Colonel de Luce’s life during the war but now frequently experiences memory loss and hallucinations due to post traumatic stress disorder from his time as a prisoner of war, lives with the family.

Maisie Dobbs By Jacqueline Winspear

Jacqueline Winspear, the author, invented the fictional Maisie Dobbs. Dobbs works as a “psychologist and investigator” in London following World War I. She returned to London to work with her mentor, the accomplished detective Dr. Maurice Blanche, after serving as a nurse for the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the war. Dobbs takes over Blanche’s private investigation company after he retires. We learn at the beginning of the first book that Maisie Dobbs was reared in London by her coster monger father, Frankie Dobbs. She was hired as a maid at the home of Lord Julian and Lady Rowan Compton after the death of her mother and the inability of her father to pay for school fees.

Lady Compton was so impressed by Maisie’s intelligence when she saw her reading books in the house library that she asked her friend Mr. Maurice Blanche to tutor Maisie. Girton College in Cambridge accepted Maisie after she won a spot there, but she quickly left to serve as a volunteer medic in the First World War. She continued caring for shell-shocked patients in England after the war before going back to Girton to finish her studies. Maisie is founding her own detective business at the opening of the first book in the series. Each book in the series focuses on a different crime or mystery, and the series charts Maisie’s personal growth as she copes with the trauma of her wartime experiences. It also charts the development of her business.

The Alienist By Caleb Carr

The setting is New York City in the year 1896. A friend and former Harvard classmate, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a “alienist,” summons reporter John Schuyler Moore to the East River on a chilly March night. They see the horrifyingly dismembered body of a young boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan’s notorious brothels, on the incomplete Williamsburg Bridge. Theodore Roosevelt, the recently appointed police commissioner, recruits the two men for the murder investigation in a highly unconventional move, relying on the quiet Kreizler’s intelligence and Moore’s familiarity with New York’s extensive criminal underground.

Sara Howard, a courageous and tenacious lady who works as a police department secretary, is welcomed to the group. The unlikely team begins what is a revolutionary effort in criminology while working in secret because alienists and the newly emerging field of psychology are viewed by the public with scepticism at best compiling a psychological profile of the man they’re looking for based on the specifics of his crimes. They enter the torturous history and deranged mind of a murderer who has killed before and will kill again before the hunt is finished as a result of their perilous mission. The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: filthy tenements and magnificent mansions, corrupt cops and showy criminals, glittering opera theatres and seedy gin mills. It is fast-paced and riveting, with a historian’s exactitude.

A Beautiful Blue Death By Charles Finch

Charles Lenox, a Victorian gentleman and armchair traveller, just wants to unwind in his private study with a cup of tea, a blazing fire, and a nice book on any given day in London. Even if it involves slogging through the snow to Lady Jane’s townhouse next door, Lenox can’t resist the chance to solve another mystery when his lifelong friend Lady Jane requests for his assistance. Prudence Smith, a previous employee of Jane’s, died by apparent suicide. But Lenox believes that a rare and dangerous poison was used in the murder, which is even more sinister. Lenox is perplexed by the absence of a clear motivation in the girl’s death, despite the fact that the house where the girl worked is teeming with potential suspects and Prudence did play with the hearts of quite a few men. When a second body is discovered at the most fashionable event of the London season, Lenox is forced to sort through a maze of allegiances and resentments.

Whose Body By Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers published a mystery book titled Whose Body in 1923. It was her first book, and it was the one where she first wrote about Lord Peter Wimsey. Thipps, an architect, discovers a dead person in the bathroom of his London apartment wearing just a pair of sunglasses. Lord Peter Wimsey, a nobleman who has just taken up the habit of conducting private investigations, decides to look into the situation. Inspector Sugg, who is in charge of the official inquiry, speculates that the body might be that of renowned financier Sir Reuben Levy, who mysteriously vanished from his bedroom the previous evening. Inspector Charles Parker, a friend of Wimsey’s, is in charge of locating Sir Reuben.

Although Sir Reuben’s body appears to be the one in the bath at first glance, it quickly becomes apparent that it is not him, and it is possible that the two incidents are unrelated. Parker welcomes Wimsey to his investigation. Since a teaching hospital is close to Thipps’s apartment, Wimsey muses over the idea that a medical student’s practical joke may have been to blame for the body’s sudden emergence. However, the renowned neurosurgeon and surgeon Sir Julian Freke’s testimony at the inquest, which claims that no subject was missing from his dissecting room, rules out that theory.

The Bone Collector By Jeffery Deaver

Jeffery Deaver published his thriller The Bone Collector in 1997. Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic criminalist who is quadriplegic, is introduced in the book. T.J. (Tammie Jean) Colfax and John Ulbrecht, two coworkers, hail a taxi at a New York City airport. They arrive in an abandoned warehouse district after a brief journey through New York. They beg the driver to let them out, but he refuses since the cab’s doors are locked. The following day, Midtown NYPD Patrol Officer Amelia Sachs receives a call about a potential killing along some railroad tracks. Her initial search is unsuccessful until she notices what she believes to be a dead tree sticking out of the ground close to the railroad tracks.

She descends the embankment and, upon closer inspection, discovers that it is actually a hand protruding out of the ground, its flesh having been severed, with a huge diamond ring having been set on one of its bony fingers. She makes a hole in the ground and pulls out John Ulbrecht’s face, who has been buried alive. Amelia reports the discovery and safeguards the area by halting a railway and air traffic. When the doorbell rings, quadriplegic and former forensic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme is waiting for a visitor at his apartment. He has two unexpected guests, homicide detectives Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks, says his carer Thom as he opens the door. Rhyme initially tells Thom he doesn’t want to see them, but he eventually decides to talk to them.

The Cater Street Hangman By Anne Perry

The death of one of their own at the hands of the Cater Street murderer causes panic and fear to grip the Ellison household. Their maid becomes the third victim of a killer who uses cheese wire to strangle young ladies and leaves their swollen-faced bodies on the dark streets of this affluent neighbourhood while Mrs. Ellison and her three daughters are out. To get to the truth, Inspector Pitt, the case’s assigned investigator, must scale the barriers of upper-class society. His thorough inquiry eventually exposes secrets and ambitions as the correct facade of the privileged world is peeled away, making suspicion more terrifying than reality. Despite her efforts to adhere to the constricting rules of Victorian politeness, outspoken Charlotte Ellison has no trouble expressing herself to the grating policeman.

The socially mismatched duo must unravel the riddle before the hangman strikes once more as their relationship changes from competitive sparring to a loving one. The Cater Street Hangman, the first book in the long-running series by Edgar Award–winning author Anne Perry, is rich with accurate historical details and blends a suspenseful mystery with a blossoming romance between Inspector Pitt and Charlotte Ellison. More recent books in the series include The Angel Court Affair and Treachery at Lancaster Gate. Perry has emerged as one of the most renowned names in detective fiction and is also the author of the William Monk Novels. Pitt’s compassion and Charlotte’s intelligence make them compatible sleuths and incredibly likeable characters, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Perry also has the talent for making the Victorian age appear contemporary and very much alive.

Fer De Lance By Rex Stout

Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe detective book, Fer-de-Lance, was released in 1934 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. Under the title “Point of Death,” the novel first appeared in condensed form in The American Magazine in November 1934. Meet Nero Wolfe, a 1936 motion picture, was made based on the book. Crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft includes Fer-de-Lance in his comprehensive list of the most significant works of mystery fiction in his ground-breaking 1941 book, Murder for Pleasure. In the first chapter, Wolfe makes the decision to stop drinking illegal beer and has Fritz to pick up samples of all 49 brands that are currently on the market so he may choose one. The date in the book is provided as Wednesday, June 7, which places it in the year 1933.

When Fred Durkin shows up and humbly requests that Wolfe talk with Maria Maffei, a friend of his wife, Wolfe is surprised to discover that none of the beers are unpleasant. It was the Great Depression at the time, and Maria’s metalworker brother Carlo was unemployed and planning to go back to Italy. He looked to suddenly become wealthy before inexplicably disappearing. Wolfe gives Goodwin the go-ahead to do some research after being impressed by Maria Maffei. Soon after Carlo vanishes, Wolfe and Goodwin find out that the death of a college president while playing golf in Westchester County, New York, is somehow connected to Carlo’s disappearance. The fundamental traits of Wolfe, Archie, and a few other regulars are already evident, even though the characters are not as fully developed as they would be later in the series.

The House Of Silk By Anthony Horowitz

British author Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes book, The House of Silk, was released in 2011. The book’s promotion stated that it was the first new book that the Conan Doyle Estate had approved that wasn’t a parody of Sherlock Holmes. A study in scarlet by the novel’s original author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, begins with a brief, personal account of events by Watson. The reader is given information about Watson and Holmes’ first encounter, including information about the Afghan War and the case that was “too startling to be divulged until now.” A man named Edmund Carstairs, an art dealer whose paintings had been destroyed by a group of Irish criminals, is introduced as the client of “The Flat Cap case.”

After a hired detective fails to solve the murder of Carstairs’ client, he turns to Sherlock Holmes, who enlists the help of the Baker Street Irregulars. After finding the hotel where the alleged Keelan O’Donaghue, one of the gang’s leaders, is presently staying, Ross, one of the Irregulars’ newest recruits, is assigned to wait outside until Holmes, Watson, and Mr. Carstairs arrive. When the group does arrive, Ross appears eerily horrified and is subsequently discovered brutally killed by the House of Silk goons. When Holmes succeeds in the House of Silk case, he is falsely accused of murder and imprisoned. Before Holmes can be killed, Watson meets with a mysterious criminal who turns out to be Professor Moriarty. The criminal gives Watson the key to unlock Holmes’ prison cell.

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