The Uncollected Cases of Sherlock Holmes presents eight new stories about Holmes which set the great detective against the background of Victorian England, an era of enormous progress, in science, transport, and medicine but which also witnessed a surge in urban poverty, prostitution and imperial adventurism. Each of the stories in this collection engages with an aspect of this background. In ''The Sicilian Defence'', Holmes comes to the aid of a disgraced army veteran who has fallen in love with a Sudanese woman and incurred the wrath of her father, whilst in ''The Archaeopterx'' Holmes has to recover an important fossil which has been stolen from the Natural History Museum. In ''The Missing Heir'' Holmes is asked to find the heir to a great fortune, considered by his family to be mentally unstable, and in ''The Dunwich Ghost'' he investigates the plight of an old army colleague of Watson''s who is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife.

The Holmes who emerges from these stories justifies the description of him by Watson as the ''best and wisest of men.'' Whether investigating a gang of forgers, securing justice for a murdered prostitute or facing a Russian spy we see his ferocious intelligence alongside a strong humanitarian bias. Despite his idiosyncracies, his solitary temperament, his melancholia and addiction to cocaine, he is both a man of his time and a man for our time.

The author of this volume is Geoffrey Finch, an Associate Lecturer in English Language at the Open University. Geoffrey has taught at Universities in Africa, New Zealand and the UK. He lives in Greater London with his wife and their cat, Humphrey, who makes a guest appearance in the fifth story, ''The Cathedral Cat''.