The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries
Page 1
ALSO EDITED BY OTTO PENZLER
The Big Book of Espionage
The Big Book of Reel Murders
The Big Book of Female Detectives
The Big Book of Rogues and Villains
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper
The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories
The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries
The Big Book of Ghost Stories
Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!
The Big Book of Adventure Stories
The Vampire Archives
Agents of Treachery
Bloodsuckers
Fangs
Coffins
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Otto Penzler
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593311028
Ebook ISBN 9780593315804
Cover design by Joe Montgomery
Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Arcangel
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Otto Penzler
Detective Stories
One Night in a Gaming-House
"Waters"
The Biter Bit
Wilkie Collins
Hunted Down
Charles Dickens
The Wife-Killer
James M’Govan
My Adventure in the Flying Scotsman
Eden Phillpotts
The Mystery of a Handsome Cad
Moll. Bourne
The Jewelled Skull
Dick Donovan
The Greek Interpreter
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step
C. L. Pirkis
The Opal of Carmalovitch
Max Pemberton
An Oak Coffin
L. T. Meade & Clifford Halifax
The Stanway Cameo Mystery
Arthur Morrison
The Divination of the Zagury Capsules
Headon Hill
Five Hundred Carats
George Griffith
The Vanishing Diamonds
M. McDonnell Bodkin
Hagar of the Pawn-Shop
Fergus Hume
The Robbery in Phillimore Terrace
Emmuska Orczy
Crime Stories
Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
The Advocate’s Wedding-Day
Catherine Crowe
Levison’s Victim
M. E. Braddon
The Pavilion on the Links
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Knightsbridge Mystery
Charles Reade
The Three Strangers
Thomas Hardy
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
Oscar Wilde
The Mystery of the Strong Room
L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace
The Hammerpond Park Burglary
H. G. Wells
The Ides of March
E. W. Hornungh
The Story of the Lost Special
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Episode of the Tyrolean Castle
Grant Allen
The Diamond Lizard
George R. Sims
A Prince of Swindlers
Guy Boothby
International Stories
The Nail
Pedro de Alarcón (Spanish)
The Invisible Eye
Erckmann- Chatrian (French)
God Sees the Truth, but Waits
Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
The Moscow Theater Plot
Alfredo Oriani (Italian)
The Little Old Man of Batignolles
Émile Gaboriau (French)
The Deposition
Luigi Capuana (Italian)
Vendetta
Guy de Maupassant (French)
The Confession of a Woman
Guy de Maupassant (French)
The Swedish Match
Anton Chekhov (Russian)
Sleepy
Anton Chekhov (Russian)
Well-Woven Evidence
Dietrich Theden (German)
American Stories
The Purloined Letter
Edgar Allan Poe
A Thumb-Print and What Came of It
Mark Twain
My Favorite Murder
Ambrose Bierce
The Lady, or the Tiger?
Frank Stockton
The Corpus Delicti
Melville Davisson Post
A Difficult Problem
Anna Katharine Green
The Suicide of Kiaros
L. Frank Baum
INTRODUCTION
The Victorian era is, for what seem like obvious reasons, defined by the life span of the British Queen Victoria, which dates from her birth in 1837 and ends with her expiration in 1901. Those early years, when she was an infant and then a toddler and then an adolescent (although it may be difficult to envision her as such) did not actually produce much in the way of what we recognize as “Victorian fiction,” which developed later in her life—and beyond. Indeed, much Edwardian fiction, if we read it without being aware of publication dates, has precisely the tone and attitude of the works produced during her long reign. Nonetheless, this volume strictly adheres to the parameters of her time on this side of the grass.
The possibility of detective fiction was slim until there was such a thing as a detective. In England, the first stirring of an organized police force was the formation of Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act in 1829, which established London’s Metropolitan Police. As a consequence, the branch that became the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was created in 1878 to undergo detective work. Acknowledgment of Peel’s achievement continues to the present day as English police officers are commonly referred to as “bobbies.” Yes, there had been Bow Street runners toward the end of the eighteenth century, but crediting them with being organized is an optimistic hallucination.
This development of a police department resulted in a new literary genre that quickly became highly popular: the memoirs of police officers. This avalanche of allegedly true, real-life adventures, memoirs, reminiscences, experiences, notebooks, etc., of detectives—frequently noted the protagonist’s connection to Scotland Yard or other police forces in Edinburgh, Dublin, London, and other, more remote, crime-fighting organizations—became the favorite reading of a large section of the British public.
The proliferation of these books, mainly written by hacks who were far more interested in creating thrills and suspense than in accurately portraying genuine police cases, was abetted by the development of printing and binding processes that made books less expensive to produce and thus more affordable for a larger portion of the public than ever before. This coincided with a greater emphasis on literacy in Great Britain, increasing the potential readership for these memoirs, as well as other types of popular fiction.
The first author of distinction to use a policeman as a major character in a work of fiction was Charles Dickens, who created Inspector Bucket as a crucial figure in Bleak House (1852–1853). The publication of the novel did not spur an immediate rush by the literary crowd to write more novels and stories about police officers, but it did open the door a crack to encourage writers to work in the crime genre, frequently known in those days as “sensation” novels. Wilkie Collins, a friend and frequent collaborator of Dickens, sometimes credited, sometimes not, was the first and best author who followed in his wake, first with the nearly perfect book, The Woman in White (1860), and then The Moonstone (1868), famously described by T. S. Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best” detective novel of all time. He was wrong on all three counts but it would be rude to quibble about this worthy book.
In the short form, credit is (correctly) given to Edgar Allan Poe with the invention of the detective short story upon his publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. While the story strives for and succeeds in creating excitement, stretching credibility, it and Poe’s next two detective stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (a genuinely boring narrative) and the exemplary “The Purloined Letter,” laid the foundation for detective fiction as it has been conceived and executed ever since. These seminal works, collected in Poe’s Tales (1845), were relatively unsuccessful as the public cried for more of his tales of horror and the supernatural and contemporary authors therefore did not follow in his footsteps. Seeley Regester’s novel The Dead Letter (1867) caused no stir, though Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878), more than thirty years later, enjoyed success, as did the books she wrote for the next forty-five years.
Apart from these and a few additional anomalies, it took Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, the most famous person in the world, to bring the detective story to its place as the most popular literary form in all of fiction.
Although the publication of his first two novels about Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890), brought Doyle some success, it was his clever invention of connected stories that put him at the apex of the pantheon of the most significant British writers of detective fiction. While it had long been a popular feature of magazines to serially run chapters of novels in its pages, Doyle conceived the notion of having a complete story in a single issue but featuring the same central character in an ongoing series. He suggested the idea to the fledgling Strand Magazine and H. Greenhough Smith, its editor, understood the concept and immediately jumped on board; the success of Holmes and The Strand were assured.
“After Holmes, the deluge!” as the great bookman and Sherlockian Vincent Starrett accurately noted. The enormity of the popularity enjoyed by Doyle and his Holmes adventures was lost on neither authors nor publishers. The race was on to find the next detective hero and there was no shortage of authors scribbling madly away nor of magazine and book publishers eager to publish them. Many were promoted as a rival of Holmes (as if), the new Holmes, the American Holmes, the female Holmes, and so on. Some were excellent, many were pretty good, and the majority were dross—roughly in equal percentage to most things in the world of the arts.
This volume attempts to identify and collect the greatest of the great, the best of the very good, and avoids the dross in the history of Victorian mystery stories. The self-imposed limit of one story per author (with a few exceptions) means that you won’t find twenty Sherlock Holmes stories here, nor some of the outstanding works by Wilkie Collins, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Robert Louis Stevenson. You will find familiar names and some obscure ones, with a focus on including stories of historical significance in the development of the genre.
In addition to the outstanding detective stories of the era, there are a large number of crime stories. While an immediate response to the notion of burglars, robbers, and other miscreants may seem counterintuitive to an aficionado of detective fiction, now as well as then, the skill of the creators of these characters often changes our minds, giving us a somewhat different perspective. Criminality is repugnant to most decent and honorable people, yet sympathetic safecrackers, con men, and other rogues may not be quite the scourge that they seem to be at first blush.
Many of the crooks in this collection steal for a good cause, to help a friend extricate himself from a difficult situation, or to behave like Robin Hood. Some of the most charming criminals merely love the excitement of the game, and some steal from people who seem eminently worthy of having their pockets picked.
As mentioned above, the early days of the Edwardian era were hardly distinguishable tonally and psychologically from the latter years of Victoria’s reign. This, however, slowly began to change, and then was tumultuously and irrevocably altered with the outbreak of the first World War.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the seeds of change were beginning to sprout like daffodils in March when it was too cold for them to blossom but their heads were visible poking through the softening ground. For what seemed like the first time in British and American history, young men ceased to attend evening prayers, while women openly smoked cigarettes. Some even advocated suffrage. It wasn’t long before they exposed their ankles. Automobiles were replacing horse-drawn carriages, and gaslight was giving way to electric illumination. A new era was beginning.
The Victorian age seemed a simpler, more genteel time, romantic in our vision. The harsh reality for the greatest part of the population was quite different, as poverty still held them captive. Most of the stories in this book have the delicious image of manor houses and gentlemen’s clubs, of dress balls, dinner jackets, and beautiful gowns, of fabulous jewels and glorious inheritances. And excellent manners.
Let’s enjoy this vision, not think about what dentistry was like a century and a half ago.
—Otto Penzler
DETECTIVE STORIES
One Night in a Gaming-House
“WATERS”
While hardly a distinguished stylist, William Russell (1807–1877), using the pseudonym “Waters,” holds an important position as the first British author to write detective short stories.
Little is known of his life (his American publisher even published his name as Thomas Waters on some early printings and Thomas Russell on others), but he was surprisingly prolific considering that he was the first to write this new kind of fiction. England’s Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 allowed for the creation of a Detective Branch in 1842, which ultimately became the CID in 1878, colloquially known today as Scotland Yard. Since there were very few police officers (and they were largely unpopular, as honest citizens didn’t like plainclothes “spies” among them), it is not surprising that there had been no notion of writing about them. “Waters” even preceded Inspector Bucket, the police detective in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853), who is often cited as the first policeman in British mystery fiction.
Russell, who also wrote as Inspector F. Gustavus Sharp, Lieutenant Warneford, and Warne
r Warren, produced about fifty books, all in the mystery field.
In The Recollections of a Detective Policeman (1852), the stories are told in first person, by “Waters,” in what purports to be the real-life experiences of a member of the Metropolitan police in cases that involve forgers, counterfeiters, thieves, confidence men, and murderers. With his early success in solving crimes, he is promoted to the rank of detective and given two assistants, one of whom is an expert ventriloquist.
The success of this volume encouraged not only Russell but a tidal wave of other authors to produce more “real-life” adventures, memoirs, experiences, notebooks, diaries, cases, autobiographies, reminiscences, and revelations over the next half century. Most were first published in the newly created “yellowbacks”—inexpensive books bound in colorful yellow boards with bright illustrations of the heroes, often engaged in battle with a villain or talking to a pretty woman.
“One Night in a Gaming-House” was originally published in the July 28, 1849, issue of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal; it was first collected in The Recollections of a Detective Policeman (New York, Cornish, Lamport,1852). It was first published in England as The Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer (London, J. & C. Brown, 1856).
ONE NIGHT IN A GAMING-HOUSE
“Waters”
A little more than a year after the period when adverse circumstances—chiefly the result of my own reckless follies—compelled me to enter the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, as the sole means left me of procuring food and raiment, the attention of one of the principal chiefs of the force was attracted towards me by the ingenuity and boldness which I was supposed to have manifested in hitting upon and unravelling a clue which ultimately led to the detection and punishment of the perpetrators of an artistically-contrived fraud upon an eminent tradesman of the west end of London. The chief sent for me; and after a somewhat lengthened conversation, not only expressed approbation of my conduct in the particular matter under discussion, but hinted that he might shortly need my services in other affairs requiring intelligence and resolution.