Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection: An Oxford Anthology

The Victorian era saw the first great flowering of the detective story. Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.S. LeFanu, 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 a vast array of detectives and villains, and a multitude of murder methods and motives. In Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter," the identity of the robber is known from the start--it is the surreptitious retrieval of the letter that is the mystery. In M. McDonnell Bodkin's "Murder By Proxy," a gentleman is shot in the head at close range, by a murderer who was not even in the same room. Charles Dickens's "Hunted Down" portrays a murderer who was slowly poisoning his very own nieces for their insurance money. And in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special," a train and its passengers vanish in thin air. In addition, Cox (who is rapidly becoming one of the foremost experts on Victorian popular fiction) arranges the stories in chronological order 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, Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection not only offers hours of enjoyment and escape for all lovers of crime fiction, but also brings alive the society, language, the sights, and sounds of the Victorian age. Contents: The purloined letter by Edgar Allan Poe The murdered cousin by J.S. Le Fanu Hunted down by Charles Dickens Levison's victim by Mary Elizabeth Braddon The mystery at number seven by Mrs Henry Wood The going out of Alessandro Pozzone by Richard Dowling Who killed Zebedee? by Wilkie Collins A circumstantial puzzle by R.E. Francillon The mystery of Essex stairs by Sir Gilbert Campbell The adventure of the blue carbuncle by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The great ruby robbery by Grant Allen The sapient monkey by Headon Hill Cheating the gallows by Israel Zangwill Drawn daggers by C.L. Pirkis The greenstone god and the stockbroker by Fergus Hume The arrest of Captain Vandaleur by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace The accusing shadow by Harry Blyth The ivy cottage mystery by Arthur Morrison The Azteck opal by Rodrigues Ottolengui The long arm by Mary E. Wilkins The case of Euphemia Raphash by M.P. Shiel The tin box by Herbert Keen Murder by proxy by M. McDonnell Bodkin The duchess of Wiltshire's diamonds by Guy Boothby The story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith by E. and H. Heron The lost special by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The banknote forger by C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne A warning in red by Victor L. Whitechurch and E. Conway The Fenchurch Street mystery by Baroness Orczy The green spider by Sax Rohmer The clue of the silver spoons by Robert Barr