The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

✍ Scribed by Sims, Michael

• Book ID: 108632166
• Publisher: Penguin
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 277 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Move over, Holmes, the ladies have arrived! It is the late Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, female detectives such as Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. Michael Sims, editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, has brought together some of the era's great crime-fighting females in a classic collection of suspense and charm. *** Writer and editor Michael Sims has followed up his wonderfully entertaining Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime with a sequel of sorts that shines a light (see the fun cover!) on another aspect of suspense fiction in the late 1800s and early 1900s: The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime. In researching the gaslight crime anthology, Sims discovered “how few of the great women detectives and criminals of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are remembered today” — a situation that certainly needed remedying. In the interim between that collection and this one, Sims also revisited one of the earliest and most successful female crime novelists in the U.S., presenting just last year a must-have new edition of Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case, and so it’s perhaps no surprise that two of Green’s other series protagonists appear (much deservedly) among the eleven pieces in the new collection: the young and spunky Violet Strange, a socialite with a flair for detection, and the “spinster snoop” Amelia Butterworth, a precursor of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. While several of the authors here are female — Green, Mary Wilkens, and C.L. Pirkis — Sims stresses that the collection’s focus is on female characters, so male authors outnumber the ladies, even as all of them champion female protagonists. Selections range from W.S. Hayward, whose Revelations of a Lady Detective was first published anonymously sometime in the early 1860s, to George R. Sims, whose heroine Dorcas Dene suggests to Sims a female Sherlock Holmes (she debuted just three years after Holmes’ “death” at Reichenbach Falls), to Hugh C. Weir, whose Madelyn Mack, Detective was inspired by (if not entirely modeled after) real-life investigator Mary Holland, who joined her husband in running a detective agency and publishing a popular law enforcement periodical and became the first female fingerprinting expert in the United States. Sims has not only gathered a fine array of stories but also takes care to place them in the kind of historical context I’ve already hinted at above — and he’s equally adept at framing these tales in today’s terms as well, as quick to mention Veronica Mars, for example, as the Memoirs of Vidocq. In short, a fine edition of classic crime fiction with a feminine flair.