The Victorian era saw the first great flowering of the detective story. Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.S. LeFanu, and a host of others pioneered a genre of fiction that remains among the most popular today. Now, in
Read Michael Sims's posts on the Penguin BlogAn exclusive collection-the first- ever gathering of rogues from the gaslight era collected here for the first time: the best crime fiction from the gaslight era. All the legendary thieves are present-Arsène L
Rich, varied collection of 14 extraordinary Victorian and Edwardian crime stories, many never before published in book form: Kipling's "The Return of Imray"; "The Tragedy of the Life Raft" by Jacques Futrelle; "The Copper Beeches" by Arthur Conan Doyle; p
A classic compendium of espionage stories penned by some of the greatest writers and most famous spies. With a new introduction by Stella Rimington, former head of MI5.The foxhunter, the angler, the cricketer — each has had his own bedside book. Why not
Kai Lung's Golden Hours By Ernest Bramah. Preface: Hilaire Belloc. Man is born to make. His business is to construct; to plan; to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing. That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve
"Ho, illustrious passers-by!" says Kai Lung as he spreads out his embroidered mat under the mulberry-tree. "It is indeed unlikely that you could condescend to stop and listen to the foolish words of such an insignificant and altogether deformed person as
Selected from the works of American, British, and French writers, 21 rare and seldom-anthologized stories include "A Bottomless Grave" by Ambrose Bierce, "The Ship that Saw a Ghost" by Frank Norris, Guy de Maupassant's "The Tomb," Richard Marsh's "The Hau
"A Sweet Girl Graduate is a vivid and detailed description of college life among a perfect bevy of young misses in the old English university town of Kingsdene. It follows the fortunes of a young Devonshire lass who goes away to college and finds herself
While Sherlock Holmes pooh-poohed the notion that the supernatural could invade our daily lives, not all fictional detectives have. There is a long history of literary sleuths who accept the reality of those supernatural intrusions in order to solve a cas