Victorian Delights

If you enjoy the short stories that were so popular during the Victorian era a century ago, the kind of stories that you'll find in "The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime," reviewed here earlier in the week. then you might also enjoy a couple of other, similar collections which have been mentioned here in the past.

The first is the companion volume to the one reviewed here this week about Victorian women in crime - another compilation by editor Michael Sims called "The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes." The focus here is not on the detectives - it's on the criminals. You'll meet some of the rather amazing rogues who inhabited Victorian crime stories, much to the delight of their audiences - people like Four Square Jane, Get Rich Quick Wallingford and Raffles. For the most part, they're "caper" stories, and it's a very entertaining collection.

You'll get a broader overview in"Detection by Gaslight: 14 Victorian Detective Stories," a collection put together by Douglas G. Greene for Dover Thrift Editions, where you'll find not only Sherlock Holmes but many of his literary rivals, male and female. Father Brown is here, and the Old Man in the Corner, and Loveday Brooke and the Thinking Machine.

Taken as a group these three anthologies will provide a good taste of short mysteries from the gaslight era. All of them have been reviewed on the padcast - you can find the audio links on the "Backlist" page of this site, where they are listed alphabetically by editor.

Comments

[Josiah]

I still need to scoop these books up, if only for the Michael Sims introductions. (He edited the Penguin edition of Arsene Lupin, and I love his work on that book.)

I already have most of the stuff from the Gaslight Crime book in the form of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes books, edited by Hugh Greene. Out-of-print but awesome.

I really wish all of this stuff would get Twilight-popular, because I want Penguin to publish more books about Lupin, Fantomas, & A.J. Raffles.

Oh yeah, Happy 4th of July. Thanks for sharing with us.

[Les Blatt]

Josiah, I had forgotten that Sims did the introduction to "Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief," and you're right - it is another first-rate collection, for which Sims and Penguin both deserve credit (not to mention Maurice LeBlanc, of course!). Penguin Classics has been reprinting some really great books, and I'm going to have to make time to go through their extensive catalog for more candidates for reviewing!

Oh, and Happy 4th back at you!