Prince Zaleski by M. P. Shiel

If you find Holmes and Poirot insufficiently cerebral, a little too everyday action hero, then Zaleski is the detective for you. Exiled and lovelorn, he broods alone (but for a black manservant, of whom frankly the less said the better) in a wing of a ruined abbey set among cypresses and poplars. We first see him reclining beside a partially-unwrapped mummy, "discarding his gemmed chibouque and an old vellum reprint of Anacreon". From the opulent, narcotic haze of this sanctum he declines to shift for the first two adventures, unravelling otherwise insoluble mysteries of ancestral curses and ancient gems simply from what is reported to him by the narrator Shiel, who might thus be considered a far more poetically-inclined Watson. Shiel considered himself Doyle's superior, and the solutions are exactly the sort of thing someone might come up with when they're trying to outdo Holmes but haven't twigged the very precise - if indefinable - limits of fairness in a puzzle; everything hinges on word association, dubious scholarship and the like, such that the reader's reaction is less likely to be 'Good heavens!' that 'You what?' But in Holmes the intricate solutions were only ever part of the appeal, and in Zaleski they're barely even that. It's the atmosphere that matters. And in the last of these three original stories*, that atmosphere is whipped into such a ferment that you start to wonder if Shiel (the writer) was receiving some distorted yet overwhelming vision of the future. True, there is the line at which one can only respond with a hollow laugh, where Zaleski tells his friend that war will doubtless be extinct within their lifetimes. But otherwise...an epidemic of murder and insanity which begins in Germany. Eugenic tirades. Visions of a future society in which technological advancement goes hand-in-hand with sacrificial hecatombs devoted to preserving the purity of the race. And the story is entitled 'The S.S.'.