Prince Zaleski

Arguably the most decadent of all fictional sleuths, Prince Zaleski relies upon the methods of ratiocination so beloved of Sherlock Holmes. But unlike his deer-stalkered colleague, Zaleski rarely needs even to leave his divan to solve the perplexing mysteries brought before him by Shiel. Rather than give crude chase to the perpetrators of these sophisticated crimes, Zaleski reclines elegantly in his semi-ruined abbey, ‘a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom,’ smoking hashish and fashioning solutions from his encyclopedic knowledge of the esoteric. Although he is in this respect akin to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, Zaleski is primarily an up-to-the-minute 1890s aesthete, prompting one critic to suggest that he is based on that tragically extravagant poet of death, Count Eric Stenbock.

Prince Zaleski contains the three tales originally collected in John Lane’s Keynotes edition, (1893) along with three further stories, one unfinished, which represent later ‘collaborations’ with the poet, writer and literary researcher John Gawsworth.

Brian Stableford provides an illuminating Introduction to the twilight world of Prince Zaleski, and R.B. Russell’s Note explains the genesis of the three stories written with John Gawsworth.

Prince Zaleski is a sewn hardback book of 187+xxviii pages.

Limited to 400 copies.