Edinburgh enjoys a high profile nowadays when it comes to crime fiction. Writers like Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and Quintin Jardine all set their best-selling novels in the Scottish capital. What is less well known is that the city 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 like 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. McLevy had been all but forgotten until Mercat Press reissued a selection of his work in 2001, when the stories received widespread acclaim, notably from Quintin Jardine - These stories are true crime classics, imbued with all the pathos, darkness and occasional humour that you will find in the best crime fiction ...They remain an outstandingly good read, as well as being a very important contribution to the social history of that time.
This new volume, featuring true accounts of a further 29 of McLevy's cases, gathers together the rest of the famous sleuth's writings.