A mystery, a thriller, and a low-keyed romance, this novel takes the form of a puzzle. Life follows its uneventful course at The Franchise, a somewhat decayed estate inherited by a mother and daughter, Mrs. Sharpe and Miss Marion Sharpe,… Read More ›
A suspenseful thriller that alternates between the story of a potential victim and that of her potential predator, Felicia’s Journey follows the title character from her bleak young life in Ireland to an unknown future in England. She is pursuing… Read More ›
This novel of mystery and detective fiction features a first-person narrator, Faith Severn, who is the niece of the hanged murderess, Vera Hillyard, twin to Faith’s father, John Longley. The story is set after World War II but looks back… Read More ›
In this example of mystery and detective fiction, the author introduces her recurring investigator, Inspector Adam Dalgleish of Scotland Yard, who returns for many more subsequent adventures. In his first appearance, he is faced with a crime that at first… Read More ›
One of Christie’s most admired mysteries and a fine example of mystery and detective fiction, The A. B. C. Murders pits Hercule Poirot against someone who kills by the alphabet and who also sends Poirot an ominous letter before each… Read More ›
According to Sheridan Le Fanu, he had published a shorter form of his novel Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh under the title “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess”; reports as to where the story appeared… Read More ›
One of Henry James’s shortest novels, The Turn of the Screw first appeared in Collier’s Weekly. When published in a volume titled The Two Magics, it appeared with another story titled Covering End. Although brief, it captured readers’ imagination and… Read More ›
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, to little fanfare. A Study in Scarlet, Doyle’s first novel to feature the superdetective and his friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, appeared in 1887. However, the… Read More ›
In his third and most popular novel, Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock supplied a parody of contemporary literature and authors that greatly resembled in format his previous satires, Headlong Hall (1816) and Melincourt (1817). All three contain little by way… Read More ›
In her fourth novel, Ann Radcliffe explores the machinery of the Gothic novel but reveals the mysteries referenced in her most popular work’s title. Its popularity validated her publisher’s interest in the work, which had gained unprecedented support by the… Read More ›
Wilkie Collins is best known for his works The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone, both of which reflected aspects of Collins’s own experience. By the time The Moonstone appeared serially between January and August 1868 in the periodical… Read More ›
My Name Is Red, the recipient of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2003, is perhaps the most celebrated book by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (1952– ), who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. The novel,… Read More ›
“The Ostler” was originally published in the special Christmas issue of Household Words in 1855, and Wilkie Collins later expanded this supernatural story for inclusion in The Queen of Hearts (1859) as “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman.” Collins… Read More ›
While still a 23- year-old medical student, before creating the wildly popular character of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Captain of the Pole-Star.” Conan Doyle’s tale is a ghost story set aboard an arctic expedition, narrated by John… Read More ›
A supernatural tale first published in Murray’s Magazine and then included in Vernon Lee’s collection Hauntings in 1890. It is one of the best-known examples of the Victorian ghost story and has been reprinted in many anthologies. The story spans… Read More ›
A number of Wilkie Collins’s contributions to Charles Dickens’s Household Words were reprinted in a short story collection titled After Dark (1856) published in two volumes by Smith Elder. The stories included “The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed,”… Read More ›
One of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “tales of ratiocination” whose emphasis on deductive reasoning became the basis for the modern detective story, The Purloined Letter features Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the archetype of the modern fictional detective who always outwits… Read More ›
“The Pit and the Pendulum” first appeared in Edgar Allan Poe’s collection of short stories The Gift in 1843. The story is a terrifying tale of suspense in which Poe captures the horrors of confinement and torture. The main character,… Read More ›
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an extension of his gothic tales as well as the first detective fiction, although the word detective had not been coined yet. This story, along with “The Mystery of Marie… Read More ›
Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.