The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories

by Michael Sims

Overview

The Dead Witness gathers the finest adventures among private and police detectives from the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth--including a wide range of overlooked gems creating the finest ever anthology of Victorian detective stories. "The Dead Witness," the 1866 title story by Australian writer Mary Fortune, is the first known detective story by a woman, a suspenseful clue-strewn manhunt in the Outback. This forgotten treasure sets the tone for the whole anthology-surprises from every direction, including more female detectives and authors than you can find in any other anthology of its kind. Pioneer women writers such as Anna Katharine Green, Mary E. Wilkins, and C. L. Pirkis will take you from rural America to bustling London. Female detectives range from Loveday Brooke to Dorcas Dene and Madelyn Mack. In other stories, you will meet November Joe, the Canadian half-Native backwoods detective who stars in "The Crime at Big Tree Portage" and demonstrates that Sherlockian attention to detail works as well in the woods as in the city. Holmes himself is here, too, of course-not in another reprint of an already well-known story, but in the first two chapters of A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes case, in which the great man meets and dazzles Watson. Authors range the gamut from luminaries such as Charles Dickens to the forgotten author who helped inspire Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first real detective story. Bret Harte is here and so is E. W. Hornung, creator of master thief Raffles. Naturally Wilkie Collins couldn't be left behind. Michael Sims's new collection unfolds the fascinating and entertaining youth of what would mature into the most popular genre of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802779625
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/20/2011
Series:	The Connoisseur's Collections
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	608
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Michael Sims is the author of the acclaimed Apollos Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, Adams Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, and The Story of Charlottes Web, and is the editor of the recent collections The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime and Draculas Guest: A Connoisseurs Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. He lives in western Pennsylvania.
Michael Sims is the author of four nonfiction books: Darwins Orchestra, Adams Navel, Apollos Fire, and a companion book to the National Geographic Channel series In the Womb: Animals. His three previous literary collections include The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, and Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief. His writing has appeared in many periodicals in the U.S. and abroad, including New Statesman, Washington Post, Orion, American Archaeology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. He speaks often at colleges and other institutions and has appeared on many TV and radio programs, from CBSs Early Show and Inside Edition to a BBC Radio series about the human body. His Web site is www.michaelsimsbooks.com.