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The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories
Edited by Michael Sims
#UE7792 Paperback, 608 pages; 2012 $20.00

  The Victorian era saw the birth of what would become the perennially popular detective story, which celebrates the "triumph of rationality and virtue in a cold and violent world." Beginning with William E. Burton's "The Secret Cell" (republished here for the first time since it originally appeared in 1837) and concluding with "An Intangible Clue" by American Anna Katharine Green (1915), editor Michael Sims presents twenty-two classics of the genre in chronological order by publication date. Crime fiction fanatics will find familiar favorites such as Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the first two chapters of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. But many of the featured short stories are forgotten or overlooked gems of the genre--a surprising number of them from female authors. There are even some nonfiction pieces included, such as an article Charles Dickens wrote about a real-life detective as well as one of the first newspaper accounts of a Jack the Ripper murder. The Dead Witness is a scintillating literary survey of the roots of what would become the most popular genre of the twentieth century. (AG)