L ook in any bookstore and you’ll find an entire section that serves as the legacy of an English doctor who, though blessed with talent matched only by his curiosity, would have been a complete unknown today had he not created Sherlock Holmes.

Thursday was the 149th anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and all of those titles in the mystery section are, in some way or another, indebted to Doyle’s singular creation.

Though the Holmes saga is relatively small — four novellas and 56 short stories — it contains the themes that almost every writer since has chosen when creating a fictional crime solver.

The talented protagonist with a murky past driven by his own set of desires. The faithful, not-quite-as-smart sidekick. The official police who never see the full picture. And the eccentric hobbies and personal demons. For Holmes, those peculiarities were playing the violin and injecting cocaine.

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My favorites among current practitioners are Henning Mankell and Michael Connelly. Mankell’s Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander’s talent is a world-weary persistence that keeps him at a problem long enough to tease out hidden truths.

Connelly employs a few different protagonists in his supremely suspenseful police procedurals. But I’m sometimes left cold after finishing one of them. Though his detectives are dogged and his criminals monstrous, he never quite takes us far enough inside their heads.

Perhaps it’s because he usually writes in the third person, which, paradoxically, deprives him of the judgmental detachment available to the first-person voices used by past masters like Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald.

Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was as important to American crime fiction as Holmes was to the British variety. The cynical private eye was less interested in who did it, or how they did it, than in why they did it.

The two MacDonalds (no relation) maintained Chandler’s higher standards with their private eyes Travis McGee (John D.) and Lew Archer (Ross). Like Chandler’s work, the Lew Archer series is available in a gorgeous new trade paperback series from Random House’s Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint. Some titles in the Travis McGee series can usually be found in mass-market paperback.

The most compulsively readable series of American detective stories — and the one owing the greatest debt to Doyle — is Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin stories.

A few years ago, the A&E television network credibly dramatized several of the 73 novels and novellas Stout wrote over 40 years until his death in 1975.

But as good as the series’s writing and acting was, it didn’t quite convey the mood, and the New York, that Stout created by combining in one series the best elements of the British drawing room mystery with the American wisecracking private eye.

Wolfe, a misanthropic, agoraphobic 300-pounder, is the world’s best detective, but he prefers to spend his time reading, quibbling with his live-in gourmet cook and raising orchids on the greenhouse roof of his brownstone.

Goodwin’s job is first to prod Wolfe into accepting work, and then to bring all of the facts and the suspects back to Wolfe so he doesn’t have to venture outside. Goodwin also narrates the tales, with a voice that’s both observant and wryly hilarious.

Some of Stout’s Wolfes can be found in the mystery section of your favorite chain bookstore, but you may have to hunt the used stacks somewhere else to let yourself in on some of the best reading you’ll ever treat yourself to.