Book description
The greatest ever anthology of Victorian detective stories,
The Dead Witness
gathers the finest police and private detective adventure stories from
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including a wide range of
overlooked gems.
'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 as surprises appear 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 and C. L. Pirkis take you from rural America to bustling
London, introducing you to female detectives from Loveday Brooke to
Dorcas Dene and Violet Strange.
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 though - 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 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 as
is Mark Twain, with his small-town lawyer detective. Naturally Wilkie
Collins couldn't be left behind.
Michael Sims's new collection reveals the fascinating and entertaining
youth of what would mature into the most popular genre of the twentieth
century. Long before vampires were sparkly and romantic, they were
actually scary. This collection brings together some of the Victorian
era s most chilling bloodsucker fiction
Michael Sims is
the author of acclaimed nonfiction books such as The Story of
Charlotte s Web, Apollo s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and
Imagination, Adam s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of
the Human Form, and a companion volume for the National
Geographic Channel TV series In the Womb. He has edited
numerous anthologies, including recently Dracula Guest and
The Dead Witness, the first and second in his Connoisseur s
Collection series for Bloomsbury. His essays and articles have
appeared in periodicals ranging from New Statesman and The
Times to American Archaeology and the Chronicle of
Higher Education. He reviews regularly for the Washington
Post and lives in western Pennsylvania.
