Victorian Detective Stories : An Oxford Anthology

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Victorian Detective Stories : An Oxford Anthology

selected and introduced by Michael Cox

(Oxford paperbacks)

Oxford university Press, 1993

Available at  / 12 libraries

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Note

Previous title: Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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. In this 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, gentlemen 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.

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Details

  • NCID
    BA20789501
  • ISBN
    • 019283150X
  • Country Code
    uk
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Oxford
  • Pages/Volumes
    xxvi, 578 p.
  • Classification
  • Parent Bibliography ID
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