Book description
The period from the early 1880s through the First World War has been
called "The Golden Age of the Storytellers." These were the
writers who sought not to write great literature, but to entertain,
spinning yarns to be printed and read, just as their predecessors, the
minstrels and bards, recited and were listened to. Through their
countless tales of adventure and derring-do they brought romance and
colour to the lives of those who could do no more than dream. This was
the age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling,
Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells. Canadian writers contributed
in no small way to the cornucopia of romance and adventure the reading
public could find at the newsstands and bookstores. This is the period
of which Messrs Roper, Beharriell, and Scheider in Literary
History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (2d ed.,
1976) say "the Canadian fiction-writers between 1880 and 1920
were read more widely by their contemporaries, inside and outside
Canada, than have been the Canadian fiction-writers - collectively -
since." Literary historian David Skene-Melvin, the leading
authority on Canadian criminous literature, has garnered from amongst
the collections and magazines of the period a second anthology of
stirring tales by Grant Allen, Robert Barr, Algernon Blackwood, W. H.
Blake, Susan Carleton, William Henry Drummond, William Fraser, Harvey
O'Higgins, Sir Gilbert Parker, Hesketh Pearson, Alan Sullivan, and
others, some never before anthologized, guaranteed to set the blood
a-racing and stimulate the imagination.
"Real-life settings and circumstances that seem entirely
plausible... Will appeal to those interested in stories about crimes
committed in unusual settings." Dr. David Skene-Melvin is the
dean of anthologizers of Canadian criminous short fiction and has
previously edited Crime in a Cold Climate, Investigating Women, and
Bloody York. He is also the compiler of Canadian Crime Fiction 1817199.
