Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection
Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection

Author: Michael Cox

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13:

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Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Fergus Hume, Arthur Morrison, M.P. Shiel, Baroness Orczy, Sax Rohmer, Robert Barr, and - inevitably - Arthur Conan Doyle. There are police detectives, gentleman amateurs, lady detectives (such as Catherine Pirkis's Loveday Brooke), professional consulting detectives, even an 'anti-detective' (Guy Boothby's Klimo, who devises a crime for himself to solve), and a psychic detective. The villains against whom they pit their wits are equally various, as are their crimes - from fraud and forgery to theft, abduction, and of course murder most foul, whether by poison, bullet, or blade. These stories offer hours of enjoyable escape for all lovers of crime fiction.

Detection by Gaslight
Detection by Gaslight

Author: Douglas G. Greene

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-05-04

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 0486114120

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Fourteen extraordinary Victorian and Edwardian crime stories by Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jacques Futrelle, G. K. Chesterton, and others — many never before published in book form.

The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries
The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries

Author: Otto Penzler

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 1439

ISBN-13: 0593315804

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Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler—“detective fiction’s best editor and champion” (The Washington Post)—returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants Behind the velvet curtains of horsedrawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. With his latest title in the Big Book series, Otto Penzler is cracking cases and serving up the most thrilling, suspenseful Victorian mysteries. This collection brings together incredible stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Guy de Maupassant among other legendary writers of the grand era of the British Empire. So brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries. A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL

The Invention of Murder
The Invention of Murder

Author: Judith Flanders

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2013-07-23

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 1250024889

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"Superb... Flanders's convincing and smart synthesis of the evolution of an official police force, fictional detectives, and real-life cause célèbres will appeal to devotees of true crime and detective fiction alike." -Publishers Weekly, starred review In this fascinating exploration of murder in nineteenth century England, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction Murder in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama-even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other-the founders of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell. In this meticulously researched and engrossing book, Judith Flanders retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder in Great Britain, both famous and obscure: from Greenacre, who transported his dismembered fiancée around town by omnibus, to Burke and Hare's bodysnatching business in Edinburgh; from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, to the tragedy of the murdered Marr family in London's East End. Through these stories of murder-from the brutal to the pathetic-Flanders builds a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society in Great Britain. With an irresistible cast of swindlers, forgers, and poisoners, the mad, the bad and the utterly dangerous, The Invention of Murder is both a mesmerizing tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.

The Dead Witness
The Dead Witness

Author: Michael Sims

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-12-20

Total Pages: 680

ISBN-13: 080277962X

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The Dead Witness gathers the finest adventures among private and police detectives from the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth--including a wide range of overlooked gems creating the finest ever anthology of Victorian detective stories. "The Dead Witness," the 1866 title story by Australian writer Mary Fortune, is the first known detective story by a woman, a suspenseful clue-strewn manhunt in the Outback. This forgotten treasure sets the tone for the whole anthology-surprises from every direction, including more female detectives and authors than you can find in any other anthology of its kind. Pioneer women writers such as Anna Katharine Green, Mary E. Wilkins, and C. L. Pirkis will take you from rural America to bustling London. Female detectives range from Loveday Brooke to Dorcas Dene and Madelyn Mack. In other stories, you will meet November Joe, the Canadian half-Native backwoods detective who stars in "The Crime at Big Tree Portage" and demonstrates that Sherlockian attention to detail works as well in the woods as in the city. Holmes himself is here, too, of course-not in another reprint of an already well-known story, but in the first two chapters of A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes case, in which the great man meets and dazzles Watson. Authors range the gamut from luminaries such as Charles Dickens to the forgotten author who helped inspire Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first real detective story. Bret Harte is here and so is E. W. Hornung, creator of master thief Raffles. Naturally Wilkie Collins couldn't be left behind. Michael Sims's new collection unfolds the fascinating and entertaining youth of what would mature into the most popular genre of the twentieth century.

Vintage Mystery and Detective Stories
Vintage Mystery and Detective Stories

Author: David Stuart Davies

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 1284

ISBN-13: 9781840220650

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This is a richly entertaining collection of stories from the golden age of crime fiction - a period when crimes were solved by the wit and ingenuity of the sleuth with only his own intelligence to rely on

Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction
Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction

Author: Dr Christopher Pittard

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1409478823

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Concentrating on works by authors such as Fergus Hume, Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, Christopher Pittard explores the complex relation between the emergence of detective fictions in the 1880s and 1890s and the concept of purity. The centrality of material and moral purity as a theme of the genre, Pittard argues, both reflected and satirised a contemporary discourse of degeneration in which criminality was equated with dirt and disease and where national boundaries were guarded against the threat of the criminal foreigner. Situating his discussion within the ideologies underpinning George Newnes's Strand Magazine as well as a wide range of nonfiction texts, Pittard demonstrates that the genre was a response to the seductive and impure delights associated with sensation and gothic novels. Further, Pittard suggests that criticism of detective fiction has in turn become obsessed with the idea of purity, thus illustrating how a genre concerned with policing the impure itself became subject to the same fear of contamination. Contributing to the richness of Pittard's project are his discussions of the convergence of medical discourse and detective fiction in the 1890s, including the way social protest movements like the antivivisectionist campaigns and medical explorations of criminality raised questions related to moral purity.

The Whole Art of Detection
The Whole Art of Detection

Author: Lyndsay Faye

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0802189369

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This collection of short mysteries by the international-bestselling author of Dust and Shadow “belongs on the top shelf with the very best of Doyle’s” (Nicholas Meyer, author of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution). Inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, Edgar Award–finalist Lyndsay Faye has masterfully woven these quintessential characters into her own works of fiction—from her acclaimed debut novel, Dust and Shadow, to a series of short stories for the Strand Magazine, whose predecessor published the first Sherlock Holmes story in 1892. The best of Faye’s Sherlockian tales, including two new works, are brought together in a collection that spans the character’s career, from self-taught upstart to lauded detective, both before and after he faked his own death over a Swiss waterfall in 1894. In “The Lowther Park Mystery,” the unsociable Holmes is forced to attend a garden party at the request of his politician brother and improvises a bit of theater to foil a conspiracy against the government. “The Adventure of the Thames Tunnel” brings Holmes’s attention to the murder of a jewel thief in the middle of an underground railway passage. With Holmes and Watson encountering all manner of ungrateful relatives, phony psychologists, wronged wives, outright villains, and even a peculiar species of deadly red leech, The Whole Art of Detection is a must-read for any fan of historical crime fiction. “If Lyndsay Faye’s byline weren’t on the cover, readers might deduce that the Sherlock Holmes mysteries in The Whole Art of Detection actually came from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” —David Martindale, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Author: Fergus Hume

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2016-01-18

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1473378974

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This early work by Fergus Hume was originally published in 1886 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab' is a tricky tale set in Australia and is Hume's most famous crime novel. Fergusson Wright Hume was born on 8th July 1859 in England, the second son of Dr. James Hume. The family migrated to New Zealand where Fergus was enrolled at Otago Boys' High School, and later continued his legal and literary studies at the University of Otago. Hume returned to England in 1888 where he resided in London for a few years until moving to the Essex countryside. There he published over 100 novels, mainly in the mystery fiction genre, though none had the success of his début work.