In the 1870s, there appeared a series of volumes purporting to be the auto-biographical writings of an Edinburgh policeman, James McGovan. Doubtless, inspired by McLevy, Honeyman created a character who can lay claim to being one of the first detectives in crime fiction. James McGovan walks the same Edinburgh beat as his real-life predecessor, shares his dry sense of humour and, like McLevy, never fails to get a conviction. The books will almost certainly have been known to the young Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a student in Edinburgh at the time and published his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887.