When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his meal-ticket, Sherlock Holmes in December of 1893, several thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand Magazine which left a gaping hole that the readers and the magazine desperately wanted to be filled. The story vacuum caused by Holmes' misadventure with Professor Moriarty stayed in effect for ten years, a period of time that gave birth to a number of new fictional detectives, one of which was Martin Hewitt, created by Arthur Morrison in 1894. Hewitt and a group of other crime-solvers had a monopoly on the detective business until Doyle finally relented and brought Sherlock back to life. This book chronicles seven of Hewitt's cases, and gave rise to his reputation as England's 'second-best-detective.' Like the Holmes stories, Morrison did not want the detective to talk about his own cases in the first person, so he created a sidekick who does the writing.