Sadeq Mamquli: The Sheriff of Isfahan or The Sherlock Holmes of Iran

This landmark translation introduces readers to the first modern detective novel written in Persian, originally published in 1925. Seamlessly blending the investigative brilliance of Holmesian mysteries with the rich storytelling traditions of Persian classical literature, the novel is set in the late Qajar era (circa 1860s–1880s) and follows the resourceful sheriff of Isfahan as he navigates the complexities of crime and justice during the Nasiri period. Brought to life by Mahdi Ganjavi, this translation not only preserves the novel’s vivid narrative but also reveals an astonishing real-life twist: the book itself became the key to uncovering the long-lost identity of its author, Mustaʿan al-Sultan. Both a gripping tale and a remarkable piece of literary history, this work is sure to captivate readers and scholars alike.Mahdi Ganjavi, PhD (University of Toronto), is a literary translator and distinguished historian of education, print, and literature in the Middle East. A former postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, he currently teaches at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the transnational history of literature, books, education, print, and translation, as well as the politics of archives and counter-archiving practices in the contemporary Middle East. Ganjavi’s book, Education and the Cultural Cold War in the Middle East: The Franklin Book Programs in Iran (2023), received the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) 2023 Book Award. His second monograph (co-authored), titled Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology, is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025. His scholarly writings, essays, and reviews have appeared in The American Archivist, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, and Review of Middle East Studies. Ganjavi’s translations of high modernist eco-poetry and New York School poetry into Persian have been published in several literary magazines, including Neveshta and Namomken. His translations of Likoo, a syllabic poetry from Southeast Iran, have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and Asymptote. These translations were recently published under the title Whispers of Oasis: Likoo’s Poetic Mirage (Asemana Books, 2024). Between 2016 and 2019, Ganjavi edited and oversaw the publication of seven little-known Persian novels from the 1930s and 1940s, which shed light on the origins of science fiction, detective fiction, and utopian fiction in Persian. He has also successfully completed the first critical edition of “Henriyah Translation” (Tarjumah Hinrīyah), the earliest Persian translation of One Thousand and One Nights (Maniahonar, 2022). Read more