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A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories
Walker & Company
January 2012
On Sale: December 20, 2011
608 pages
ISBN: 0802779182
EAN: 9780802779182
Hardcover
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Mystery
Gathering the finest adventures among private and police
detectives from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries-including a wide range of overlooked gems-Michael
Sims showcases the writers who ever since have inspired the
field of detective fiction. From luminaries Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Bret Harte,
Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle to the forgotten
author who helped inspire Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in
the Rue Morgue" to a surprising range of talented female
authors and detectives, The Dead Witness offers mystery
surprises from every direction. 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. Pioneer writers Anna Katharine Green and C. L.
Pirkis take you from high society New York to bustling
London, introducing colorful detectives such as Violet
Strange and Loveday Brooke. In another forgotten classic, November Joe, the Canadian
half-Native backwoods detective who stars in Hesketh
Prichard's "The Crime at Big Tree Portage," 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. Introduced by Michael Sims's insightful overview of
detective fiction, The Dead Witness unfolds the irresistible
antecedents of what would mature into the most popular genre
of the twentieth century.
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