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	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

THE BIG BOOK OF VICTORIAN MYSTERIES

Otto Penzler (Ed.)

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzlerdetective fiction's best editor and champion (The Washington Post)returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants

Behind the velvet curtains of horsedrawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. With his latest title in the Big Book series, Otto Penzler is cracking cases and serving up the most thrilling, suspenseful Victorian mysteries.

This collection brings together incredible stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Guy de Maupassant among other legendary writers of the grand era of the British Empire. So brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, now an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, and publishes classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, MWA's Ellery Queen Award and the Raven. He has been given Lifetime Achievement awards by Noircon and The Strand Magazine. His new company, Penzler Publishers, launched its imprint American Mystery Classics in October 2018; it is devoted to reissuing classic American mysteries in hardcover and paperback.

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Book Published 2021-10-01 by Vintage Crime

Comments

Edgar winner Penzler (The Big Book of Espionage Stories) draws on his encyclopedic knowledge to cast a wide net in this superior anthology of 49 stories published between 1838 and 1900. The usual suspects - Poe, Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins - are represented, but the joy for the genre lover is the chance to meet more obscure authors such as Headon Hill, who in "The Divination of the Zagury Capsules" offers an unusual armchair detective, "an Indian mystic confined to a small room in which he spends his days chewing on betel nuts and playing with his cobras." Penzler also includes tales from writers known for other kinds of fiction, including Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, and L. Frank Baum. The real treasure trove is the section featuring non-Anglo-American entries, from Spain, France, Russia, Germany, and Italy. A standout is German author Dietrich Theden's "Well-Woven Evidence," in which a police chief must figure out why the robbers who looted a safe of thousands of marks also stole "a large package of lace curtains." This doorstop volume will provide hours of pleasure reading for fans of traditional mystery fiction. (Oct.) Read more...