The Master Mummer's Mummy (Macallister Fogg #1)

In the years before the incomparable Sherlock Holmes drove away the competition, and despite his arrogant claim to be the first of his kind, Baker Street was filled with consulting detectives. Among the investigators who worked out of that famous thoroughfare, none experienced such a capricious career as Mr Macallister Fogg.

To judge Fogg against Holmes would be entirely unreasonable, for the two men couldn’t be more different in character. Where Holmes was driven and precise, Fogg was a feckless dabbler, concerned more with his mechanical inventions and chemical experiments than with the solving of his clients’ problems. Undoubtedly, had he not taken on Mrs Emma Boswell as his secretary, he’d have quickly gone out of business and there’d be no record of his eccentricities or the remarkable threats he encountered and somehow nullified. It is fair to say that Fogg, on more than one occasion, saved not just his clients but the Earth itself, and certainly could not have done so without the long suffering Mrs Boswell at his side.