Description
Detective stories, with their ingeniously devised plots and emphasis on the power of deduction, were beloved by the Victorians. Here, Michael Cox has assembled thirty-one of the finest examples of the genre, with contributions from such major figures as Edgar Allan Poe, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Baroness Orczy, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as a host of less familiar writers. Police detectives, gentlemen amateurs, lady sleuths, and even a psychic detective pit their wits against an array of equally varied villains, whose crimes range from forgery and fraud to theft and abduction - and, of course, murder.
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The Victorian era saw the first great flowering of the detective story. Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.S. Le Fanu, and a host of others pioneered a genre of fiction that remains among the most popular today. Now, in Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, Michael Cox provides a sampling of the finest detective stories written from the 1840s to the early twentieth century. Here readers will find tales displaying a vast array of detectives and villains--and a multitude of murder methods and motives--all chronologically arranged so that readers can follow the genre as it develops over time. For instance, in Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" we see an example of the many Sherlock Holmes escapades that popularized and came to typify the detective story for the Victorian public. And in the progression of the stories, we witness the evolution of the investigator from Poe's brilliant and eccentric Chevalier C. August Dupin, to Doyle's scientific Sherlock Holmes, into Robert Barr's cavalier Valmont (a possible model for Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot). Including well-known stories by famous authors, as well as little known gems reprinted for the first time, this book offers hours of enjoyment and escape for all lovers of crime fiction.
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