What if the detective wasn't the good guy? Arthur Morrison asked exactly that in 1897, and the result is one of Victorian fiction's most delightfully corrupt antiheroes. Horace Dorrington is a private investigator operating in the fog-choked streets of London, but don't expect him to solve crimes through brilliant deduction. He'll burgle, blackmail, and if necessary, murder to get what he wants. Our narrator is James Rigby, a man who stumbles into Dorrington's services and slowly realizes he's stumbled into something far darker than he imagined. The six stories here unfold through Rigby's increasingly horrified perspective as he watches Dorrington work and begins to understand just how thoroughly he's entangled himself with a man who has no rules, no conscience, and no intention of letting his clients go. It's a gleeful subversion of the Sherlock Holmes boom that defined the era, replacing Watsonian admiration with creeping dread. Morrison knows exactly what his readers expect from a detective story and systematically violates every expectation.
