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Like ghost stories, short tales of mystery and detection were part of the Victorian reader's staple diet. But where the ghost story often cautioned against too great a faith in reason and showed men and women being persecuted by the inexplicable, the detective story celebrated the human ability to explain and comprehend. Edgar Allan Poe's stories concerning the investigations of the brilliant but eccentric Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin form the fountainhead of the detective-story tradition. show more Thereafter the detective story developed within the framework of mid-Victorian sensation fiction, with its emphasis on crime in contemporary settings and ingeniously devised plots. Then, in 1891, the first series of Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in the Strand magazine and the detective story was never the same again. In this entertaining anthology Michael Cox has assembled a wide ranging selection of 31 stories from authors such as J.S. 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. They also bring alive the Victorian age - its social distinctions, its language and domestic surroundings and, most typically, the sights and sounds of its streets - and together provide an outline of the Victorian detective story from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. show lessTags
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Excellent collection of Victorian detective fiction, covering the genre in 31 tales dating from 1845 (Poe's Purloined Letter) to 1904 (Sax Rohmers Green Spider and Robert Barr's Clue of the Silver Spoons). Includes less familiar authors as well as greats like Poe, Le Fanu, Dickens, Doyle, Collins, Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, as well as bibliographic suggestions for further reading.
A chronological collection starting with Edgar Allan Poe, including well-known names such as LeFanu, Dickens, Doyle, but also more obscure ones, some in Queen's Quorum, like Grant Allen and Rodrigues Ottolengui.
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Author Information
Michael Cox was born on August 30 1948 in Northamptonshire, England. In 1989 he started work at the Oxford University Press. In 1983, Cox published his first book, a biography M. R. James, a Victorian ghost story writer. Between 1983 and 1997 he compiled and edited several anthologies of Victorian short stories for Oxford University Press. His show more first novel, The Meaning of Night, was published in 2006. Michael Cox died of cancer on March 31, 2009. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection
- Original publication date
- 1991; 1992-10-29
- Blurbers
- Kemp, Peter
- Disambiguation notice
- Do not combine "Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection" with "Victorian Ghost Stories." Both are Oxford Anthologies edited by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert. These are two different books.
"Victorian Tales of Mystery ... (show all)and Detection" and "The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories" are the same book.
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Mystery
- DDC/MDS
- 823.08720908 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Mystery fiction Mystery anthologies
- LCC
- PR1309 .D4 .V49 — Language and Literature English English Literature Collections of English literature
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 192
- Popularity
- 170,428
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.55)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
