Thu 7 Oct 2010
100 Important Books From Before the Golden Age, by David L. Vineyard
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists[18] Comments
David L. Vineyard
These are from the gray dawn of the origins of the genre up to 1913. Short story collections are included and a few novels that are only related (but closely) to the genre. They appear here in approximate chronological order, but not strictly so. Some books by an author are listed together even though they were published later.
My rule on these was simple. They had to fit within the dates and I had to have read them. The end date of 1913 marks the publication of Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley, recognized as the beginning of the Golden Age. A few toward the end were not published in book form until after Bentley, but had been serialized before and so fit in the pre-Golden Age category.
Historians of the genre will note that Dickens was not writing detective stories and I agree, but many of these early books are direct progenitors of the detective novel as we know it and in their handling of crime and criminals important to the genre.
â— Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe (the memoirs of a privateer, mostly the imagination of Defoe)
â— The Newgate Calendar by Anonymous (romanticized accounts of the likes of Dick Turpin, George Barrington, and Jonathan Wild)
â— Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding (while the novel is satirical it could almost be a playbook for the career of Vidoq)
â— Caleb Williams by William Godwin (the first crime novel — and still a rousing tale of chase and pursuit as well as an early social reform novel)
â— The Romance of the Forest by Mrs. Radcliffe (many of the Gothic trappings used by the genre later on and all the supernatural is rationally — if not always logically — explained)
â— The Tales of Hoffman by E. T. A. Hoffman (he may actually predate Poe with the first detective story)
â— Rookwood by Hugh Ainsworth (most notable for the long section of the novel known as Dick Turpin’s Ride, a forerunner of Raffles, the Saint, and the gentlemen crooks)
â— The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott (a fictional account of an actual murder with some Gothic trappings, one of Scott’s Tales of the Landlord series)
â— Wieland by Charles Brockden-Brown
â— Confessions of an Unjustified Sinner by James Hogg (both this and Wieland are examples of the foundations of the psychological crime novel)
â— The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper (the story of one of Washington’s agents during the American Revolution)
â— The Memoirs of Vidoq by Eugene Francois Vidoq (non-fiction, more-or-less about the thief turned detective who gave us Dupin, Vautrin, Jean Valjean, Lecoq, and Sherlock Holmes as well as the modern police force as we know it — and the origin of ‘cherchez la femme’)
â— Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe (no comment needed)
â— The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
â— Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by Richardson (again non-fiction, more-or-less)
â— Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (Fagin an early model for the criminal mastermind)
â— A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (international intrigue)
â— Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Inspector Bucket)
â— The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
â— The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (the first and still one of the best detective novels)
â— The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Collins’ best book and with the wonderful villainy of Count Fosco)
â— Armadale by Wilkie Collins
â— No Hero by Wilkie Collins
â— John Devil by Paul Feval pere (the first Scotland Yard detective in Gregory Temple and an early prototype for Moriarity)
â— The Black Coats by Paul Feval pere (an early novel of organized crime)
â— The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas pere (all the mystery men in literature owe a debt to Edmund Dantes)
â— The Horror at Fontenay by Alexandre Dumas pere
â— The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue (a huge crime novel by the Dickens of Paris)
â— The Wandering Jew by Eugene Sue (the use of a Tontine as a plot device and an early use of the reading of the will for dramatic purpose)
â— Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (politics, crime, injustice, Jean Valjean — yet another Vidoq figure — and the implacable Javert)
â— The History of the Thirteen by Honore de Balzac (Vidoq yet again, here as Vautrin)
â— Monsieur Lecoq by Emile Gabiorou (Gabiorou was Feval’s secretary and took the name of his hero from one of Feval’s villains — Lecoq is the most important figure between Dupin and Holmes)
â— Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (still one of the seminal books in the genre)
â— Wylder’s Hand by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
â— The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Greene (one of the classics and likely her best)
â— The Trail of the Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (splendid nonsense recently republished in a trade paperback edition with extensive notes and introduction)
â— Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume (helped to make the cab of the title the symbol of Victorian London — even though Hume is a colonial and a terrible writer)
â— The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (most editions also include “Pavilion on the Links” and “The Sire De Maltroit’s Door,” both seminal to the genre)
â— The New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson (virtually at the birth of the genre Stevenson is already poking fun at it)
â— The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osborne (humorous use of the Tontine plot beloved by the Victorians)
â— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (again, no comment needed)
â— The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
â— The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
â— The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill (an early and great locked room)
â— The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt by Arthur Morrison (the first reaction against the colorful detective as represented by Holmes, and good in their own right)
â— The Hole in the Wall by Arthur Morrison (a fine crime novel worthy of Dickens or Stevenson)
â— As a Thief in the Night by E.W. Hornung (the first Raffles collection)
â— The Experiences of Loveday Brooke: Lady Detective by C. L. Pirkis (early female sleuth — if not the first — written by a woman)
â— The Shooting Party by Anton Chekov (Chekov’s only novel and it’s a murder mystery)
â— Hilda Wade by Grant Allen (completed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an exceptional mystery of the chase and pursuit kind)
â— Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (if not a detective story, good use of detectival skills)
â— The Old Man in the Corner by Baroness Orczy (still the best of the armchair sleuths and the final story still has a kick)
â— The Man in Gray by Baroness Orczy (an early example of the historical mystery)
â— Secrets of the Foreign Office by William Le Queux (spy stories featuring Duckworth Drew — fun in the right mood)
â— The Count’s Chauffeur by William LeQueux (an early and influential use of the automobile in crime fiction)
â— The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton (first and best of the paradoxical priest)
â— The Secrets of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton (ironically these were written almost twenty years before Chesterton became a Catholic in 1922)
â— The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (the detective novel as parable and allegory)
â— My Adventure on the Flying Scotsman by Eden Phillipotts ( a novella really — Phillipotts is important both on his own — The Red Redmaynes — and because he encouraged young Agatha Christie to keep writing)
â— The Passenger From Scotland Yard by Henry Wood (murder, smuggling, and trains)
â— The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart (one of the best of uses of the Tontine plot) [1]
â— The Rome Express by Major Arthur Griffith (this helped to popularize the idea of intrigue on a train) [1]
â— Mr. Meeson’s Will by H. Rider Haggard (a mix of adventure story and trial novel with a somewhat racy finale)
â— The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman (no sooner had fingerprints been accepted as evidence in court than Freeman proved they could be forged — not unlike the detective work that would break the real Sir Harry Oakes case in 1943 in the Bahamas)
â— The Singing Bone by R. Austin Freeman (the invention of the inverted detective story, the most important innovation since Holmes)
â— John Silence by Algernon Blackwood (the finest of the psychic detectives, everyone a classic — you may never look at cats or French villages the same again)
â— November Joe by Hesketh Prichard (fine tec tales of a Canadian half-breed trapper)
â— The Eyes of Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah (Carrados is a bit of a superman, but these are still great reading)
â— The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (prototype for a thousand books of international intrigue to come)
â— The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings by L.T. Meade & Robert Eustace (an international criminal conspiracy not unlike those so popular today)
â— The Exploits of Valmont by Robert Barr (highly entertaining stories and an early forerunner of Poirot)
â— The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry (clever stories about charming con man Jeff Peters)
â— The Beetle by Richard Marsh (a mix of horror and detective story, in many ways second only to Dracula for genuine chills) [1]
â— Dr. Nikola by Guy Boothby (the Italian Peril and great fun, Nikola one of the great villains in the literature)
â— The London Adventures of Mr. Collin by Frank Heller (Philip ‘Flip’ Collin is the Danish Raffles)
â— Carnaki, Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson (supernatural sleuth and some real chills)
â— The Thinking Machine by Jacques Futrelle (Futrelle of course perished on the Titanic, but luckily there are two good collections of this series)
â— Cleek, the Man With Forty Faces by Thomas Hanshew ( a great favorite of John Dickson Carr with an penchant for impossible crimes almost as impossible as the hero, but fun in the right mood and who can resist a Scotland Yard man named Maverick Narcom?)
â— The Man in Lower 10 by Mary Roberts Rinehart (this was serialized before The Circular Staircase was published — my own choice as her best)
â— Kim by Rudyard Kipling (granddaddy of the Great Game)
â— In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis (too little read today, a splendid little book, and be sure to get the edition with the color plates by Frederic Dorr Steele) [1]
â— At the Villa Rose by A. E. W. Mason (without Hanaud there is no Poirot)
â— The Exploits of Arsene Lupin by Maurice Leblanc (the French Raffles and in much of the world a rival to Holmes himself)
â— 813 by Maurice Leblanc (Lupin’s greatest case in which is client is the Kaiser)
â— The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux (one of the great locked room tales of all time)
â— The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
â— Stories of the Railroad by Victor L. Whitechurch (these tales of Thorpe Hazel are some of the best short detective stories of their era)
â— Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries by Melville Davidson Post (the finest collection of American detective stories since Poe)
â— The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason by Melville Davidson Post (Perry’s last name is no coincidence)
â— Ashton Kirk Investigator by John McIntyre (McIntyre went on to become a serious novelist about gangsters; A-K also features in Ashton Kirk Secret Agent and others)
â— Prince Zaleski by M. P. Shiel (the last gasp of the Decadent era — unique is plot and execution)
â— The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (the first serious novel about terrorism)
â— The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace (the birth of the modern thriller)
â— The Romance of Terence O’Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer by Louis Joseph Vance
â— The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance (Vance’s Michael Lanyard would become the standard for most the gentleman crooks to come, and his adventures are still worth reading)
â— The Achievements of Luther Trant by Edwin Balmer & William McHarg (perhaps the first psychological sleuth)
â— The Power House by John Buchan (Graham Greene calls it the first modern spy novel)
â— The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (say what you will — I love it — one of the most influential books in the genre — Racist? Yes, the Anglo-Saxons are all idiots as S. J. Perlman pointed out)
â— The Silent Bullet by Arthur B. Reeve (the introduction of Craig Kennedy the Scientific Detective, dated, but these stories show some energy)
â— The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim (the last of the great Edwardian spy novels, within the next year both The Thirty Nine Steps and Riddle of the Sands would leave if forever behind)
â— The Lodger by Mrs. Belloc Lowdnes (the classic novel of Jack the Ripper)
â— Fantomas by Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre (the newspaper serialization barely squeezes in — the surreal criminal Fantomas is unique in the genre)
[1] The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart, The Rome Express by Major Arthur Griffith, In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis, and The Beetle by Richard Marsh, are all collected in one volume as Victorian Villainies edited by Graham and Hugh Greene
October 7th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Fabulous list. Regarding Mary Roberts Rinehart, I recently read THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE, which i thought was terrific. A captivating first-person voice guides you through the mystery of a missing woman (was she killed?) with unique characters, set in a locale that is important as the characters themselves- the floodwaters of Allegheny PA.
I read THE MAN IN LOWER TEN when i was a lad, and do not remember it, but i have loaded it on my Kindle to read soon. Many, if not all, of MRR’s books are available digitally at quite reasonable prices. Guess she has gone out of copyright.
October 7th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
For this particular list, you’re right, Frank. All of the books here should be in the public domain and no longer under copyright restrictions.
If they’re not available as free books online –and I have a feeling that many if not most are — then as I discovered by doing a couple of random checks, they can be gotten very inexpensively as Kindle downloads, just as you say.
Not that I own a Kindle, nor do I intend to, but that’s another story, isn’t it?
October 7th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
I read and enjoyed The Case of Jennie Brice. Meant to review here but didn’t get around to it!
I like Jennie Brice better than later mammoth Rinehart mysteries from the thirties like The Door, The Album and The Wall.
October 7th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Steve … I bought my Kindle three weeks ago. I’ve read four books and a couple short stories on it. Quite easy to get used to reading on it. It’s still not a book, but I bought the Kindle because I have just about run out of shelf space. AND — here’s the real motivator, because I’m happy piling them in columns on the floor — my wife encouraged me to get it to help cut back on my growing treasure trove. So, i am being selective in what books i will read on the Kindle and which ones I want to have in book form. A bit off tangent with this post, but …
October 7th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Rinehart’s THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE had a big influence on me at an early age. I was 12 when my father died of cancer and that summer I was alone in the house during the days and started to explore his books since I had nothing else to do. Before becoming hooked on SF, I spent many days reading western paperbacks, Erskine Caldwell Signet paperbacks with the sexy James Avati covers, and many Dell mapbacks, one of which was THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE. I was fascinated by the mystery plot and even more by the flooding of the town, which the mapback illustrated.
I believe this eventually led to me accumulating what may be a complete set of the Dell mapbacks. I guess I love maps!
October 7th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
To pick another author to talk about, I think that Melville Davidson Post’s “Uncle Abner” stories are true American classics. H. R. F. Keating refers to him as an American Sherlock Holmes, and I agree completely.
Here’s a Google link to the first book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=3R_eFov3I-oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=post+%27uncle+abner%22&source=bl&ots=Dlw2VgwNTE&sig=8DzUKufoKRMYwG_AUklQz_vr0qo&hl=en&ei=2FiuTP_aK4uqsAPBvYjNDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
What I just discovered is that later on the Post estate commissioned a writer named John F. Suter to do more Uncle Abner stories, which were themselves collected in a book called Old Land, Dark Land, Strange Land (1996).
It’s new to me. Anyone seen that one?
October 8th, 2010 at 5:15 am
After Poe, Post is probably the most important American practioner of the art until Van Dine and Ellery Queen. The Uncle Abner stories are not only fine detective stories, but simply outstanding stories as well.
Though not as good, his Randolph Mason, Walker of the Secret Service, Monsieur Jonquelle, and Sir Henry Marquis books are all worth reading.
I never saw the Suter pasticshe, but I do recall reading about them, and it seems as if I may have read one somewhere, but I’m not sure.
The Abner stories are not only outstanding mysteries but exceptional regional and historical mysteries as well. They have a moral authority to them that is unique in the genre.
Many of the books on this list are available in free electronic editions or as you say cheaply on-line in that format, and many more have been reprinted in reasonable trade paperback editons relatively recently.
So much fun has been made of Rinehart and the HIBK school of writing that it comes as a surprise sometimes that at her best she was entertaining and deserving of her success. As everyone has pointed out, some of the early books are very good.
Not every book on here is something everyone will want to read. In some cases you might only really care about one or two of the stories in a collection. Probably most modern readers wouldn’t care much for Ainsworth’s ROOKWOOD, for instance, but read the longish section known as ‘Dick Turpin’s Ride’ as simply one of the finest pieces of sustained narrative action you are likely to encounter. The rest of the book is fairly standard Gothic doings, but that seventy or so pages is outstanding.
IN THE FOG, structured like Stevenson’s NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS, is a relatively short novel composed of connected stories and still a delightful read with a twist in the tail that makes it all the more fun. I think you can even download it with the color illustrations by Steele (the finest of the American Holmes illustrators) for free.
If you only know Buchan for the Hannay stories, THE POWER HOUSE predates them (serialized in THE STRAND in 1910), and is an entertaining thriller as well as historically important. Aside from all that Buchan predicts the rise of fascism that will sweep Europe in a bit over a decade.
If you are wondering what was so racy in Haggard’s MR. MEESON’S WILL, the will in question is written on the back of a young lady who has to bare herself in open court in order for it to be read.
Victor Whitechurch, a canon of the Anglican Church, went on to write a number of good novels in the Golden Age, but did his best work with the short adventures of railroad sleuth Thorpe Hazel. If you have run through all the Doyle, Freeman, Chesterton, and Morrison and want more, this slim volume is a perfect fix.
If you only know Baroness Orczy from the Scarlet Pimpernel The Old Man in the Corner stories will be a revelation. Aside from featuring a young female journalist as Watson, they are the purest form of the armchair school and features really handsome illustrations as well.
Richard Marsh was a bestselling writer in his day though largely forgotten today. His books range from crime to horror with a few featuring detective stories, and THE BEETLE is one of the finest horror stories of all time featuring Marsh’s series hero Augustus Champnell. His best detective fiction is in his THE ADVENTURES OF JUDITH LEE, another series sleuth.
THE BEETLE has been compared to DRACULA, and the comparison is not far off.
There is an inexpensive hardcover reprint of the Chekov novel with a fine introduction by Julian Symons. It was filmed as SUMMER STORM by Douglas Sirk with George Sanders, Linda Darnell, and in a rare dramatic role Edward Everett Horton.
JOHN DEVIL and THE BLACK COATS are both in print in trade paperback editions from BLACK COATS PRESS along with other works by Paul Feval, Maurice Leblanc, and Allain and Souvestre, many translated with extensive notes by British novelist and scholar Brian M. Stableford.
Walker
I even read a few of the Caldwell’s from Penguin with the Jonas covers, but they somehow never seeme half so good as the ones with the Avati covers from Signet. Talk about the power of a cover artist …
And I think almost every book was better in a Dell Mapback edition. There was something almost magical about paperbacks then — just reading some of them felt like an adventure — and I suppose it didn’t hurt that they felt somehow a little forbidden.
For me it was a spell laid up when I was ten that I began really reading heavily and moved away from the approved books for kids. It wasn’t that they were dirty — most of them were tame, and the ones that weren’t we likely missed a good deal of, but it was like opening a door on a secret world I hadn’t really known existed.
I always think of that great scene in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY when Huw is laid up after his Mother nearly drowned and the minister brings him TREASURE ISLAND. There’s something about those books you read in that general time of your life that stays with you.
I think it was Vincent Starrett that said fourteen was the perfect age to read HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES for the first time, and luckily it was the age I first read it. Somehow whenever I open it now at least a part of me is fourteen again … though not always the part you wish was fourteen.
October 8th, 2010 at 6:24 am
Glad you included ARMADALE, my favorite Wilkie Collins. It’s a touigh book to review because the character names make it almost impossible to outline the plot.
October 8th, 2010 at 6:57 am
Excellent list!
I also would add the Rocambole character by Ponson Du Terrail or The Pont-Rouge Murder by Charles Barbara (1863).
October 8th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Fantastic – thanks for posting this and Mike Grost’s Detective Novel list too. I will be referring to these in the future. I’m a newbie when it comes to detective novels.
October 8th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Nice to have read all that! I think David, however, means simply Max Carrados and not The Eyes of Max Carrrados?
Hard to add to that nice list, but I’ll give a shout-out for Jefferson Farjeon’s father, Benjamin Farjeon (B. L. Farjeon). Primarily a mainstream novelist in the Dickensian vein, he wrote some genre works as well, including Devlin the Barber (guess who that is?).
I don’t think The Red Thumbmark comes close to being the best Freeman novel, though it has historical significance. From the pre-Golden Age period I’m with Mike Grost, I think the best is The Eye of Osiris (much more elaborate).
Also, The Singing Bone is great and very significant, but I’d like to mention “John Thorndyke’s Cases” as well. Another fine, early collection.
For Belloc Lowndes I’d add The Chink in the Armour, a sinister and effective take of murder in France. I actually prefer this to The Lodger, though that is good as well. People often have the wrong idea about The Lodger, by the way-that it’s some horrifying, nailbiting serial murderer thriller. It’s more a carefully observed study of the character of the landlady and the moral dilemma faces.
Another one by her, The End of Her Honeymoon, offers the classic Paris Expo vanishing scenario (I think the original use of this).
October 8th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Oh, another one that could be added is “Average Jones,” by the muckraking journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams. These are very American detective tales in a Holmesian vein.
October 8th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Those Dell Mapbacks are wonderful.
Didn’t know that THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE ever appeared in mapbacks – sounds neat. The later paperbacks have very good cover illustrations by Victor Kalin of the flood.
The above list is full of fascinating books.
October 9th, 2010 at 2:49 am
Alberto
Sadly I haven’t read any of the Rocambole novels. About all that is available in English (That I can find) is a translation of one of the plays. There are a few Rocambole’s available for download in French, and I may tackle them, but struggling through a Simenon or Jean Bruce in French and a Rocambole are two different propositions. This series certainly deserves to be translated, and I’d love to see some of the movies and television series — other than those two awful Mexican Rocambole films that show up once in a while on cable.
Everyone Else
Agree about EYE OF OSIRIS, but RED THUMB MARK has historical significance. I don’t think CASES was first issued in time to make the cut off, but is one of the great anthologies in the genre. All but two of the Thorndyke shorts in some editions. And another you can download free.
Lots of titles I edged out for no particular reason: AVERAGE JONES; MICHAEL DRED, DETECTIVE; the Paul Beck stories; LADY MOLLY OF SCOTLAND YARD; and on and on. Anyone wanting a complete list of early short fiction in the genre should check out QUEEN’S QUORUM, and even if you can’t find a copy of that the list has been reprinted numerous times and is likely availabe on line somewhere.
For newcomers interested in this period and later Mike Grost’s site is a good place to start, plus there is THRILLING DETECTIVE, and numerous other sites, many of them just to your right among Steve’s links. Do a little exploring and you’ll be surprised what you find.
Steve Holland’s blog BEAR ALLEY is aimed at Brit comics mostly, but he has done some excellent research on some obscure Brit crime writers both from the modern era and earller. Most recently he did a nice one on Hugh Munro who wrote the Clutha mysteries about a sort of Scottish Philip Marlowe.
It goes without saying to check out Allen Hubin’s massive ongoing CRIME FICTION site.
What I tried to do here is give as briefly as possible a sort of quick overview of the origins of the genre as we know it today. These are the books that gave birth to the genre — and often as not I’m only listing one where more than one should be pursued.
You can find many of these on line without having to haunt musty old bookstores, antique shops, small town libaries, flea markets, and keep up a nation wide (and in some cases international) correspondence with book dealers all over the US and Canada and in England. About half the works (or more) on this list could be downloaded or ordered from Amazon and others in a couple of hours instead of the years it took me to find them after running across them in obscure reference books.
If you have never read E.T.A. Hoffman, check him out. There are reprint editions from Dover and Oxford Uni. Press of his work and it’s available on line, and if you don’t know his weird tales and his early detective story “Mdme Scudery” you should. He’s a delight to read, and then you can watch the stories brought to life in the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger film of Offenbach’s opera THE TALES OF HOFFMAN.
I’ve barely scratched the surface here, and didn’t even attempt to cover things like SPRING HEELED JACK, VARNEY THE VAMPIRE, SWEENY TODD, HAWKSHAW, SEXTON BLAKE, or NICK CARTER, all of which contributed to the origin of the genre.
My biggest ommission? For me it was leaving out Frank Packard’s Jimmie Dale, the Gray Seal. I did an overview of him elsewhere on this site, and he is one of the key figures in popular fiction, putting together all the elements that would lead to the Shadow, the Spider, and eventually Batman. Aside from his historical importance he’s an early writer to use a more or less realistic social crime milieu in the hard boiled vein (he is not a hard boiled creation), and the books can still be read for pleasure and not mere research. Also left out Jack Boyle’s BOSTON BLACKIE, another seminal collection.
Fact is I could easily do another hundred titles and still not have scratched the surface. Popular fiction has many fathers (and mothers), and you never know what will show up as an influence. Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) for instance was a huge fan of many of the BOYS OWN PAPER sleuths of his youth, Sexton Blakes contemporaries, and Dorothy L. Sayers even tried her had at writing a Blake adventure, while Allingham’s whole family churned the things out for a living. Even today Michael Moorcock’s tales of Sir Seaton Begg borrow Zenith the Albino, one of Blake’s adversaries.
Edwy Searly Brooks who wrote the long running Norman Conquest series as Berkley Gray wrote six million words of the adventures of Blake and others before creating Conquest and Inspector Ironside (as Victor Gunn) at age fifty and helming their adventures for thirty years.
There is a famous example of detective work oft reprinted from Voltaire’s ZADIG, and yet another nice piece of reasoning featuring Dumas d’Artagnan in one of the Musketeers novels. Most of the mystery men in black owe something to the hero of Sue’s MYSTERIES OF PARIS, and his THE WANDERING JEW features two of the finest dramatic reading of the will scenes in literature.
Le Fanu (despite the name he is Irish) is best known today for his vampire tale “Carmilla”, but his mystery novels are second only to Collins for sheer readability even today.
Vidoq’s influence is so pervasive the genre would not even exist without him. He largely invented modern police procedure, the detective force, and was also very possibly the first private detective. A more charming rogue and rascal would be hard to imagine, and it is little wonder he dominates the genre well up to and including Sherlock Holmes. His book is perhaps the most important until Poe, and still well worth reading.
Check out Douglas Sirk’s film A SCANDAL IN PARIS (available on DVD) with George Sanders as Vidoq for an entertaining, if fictionalized, look at his career.
Of course you don’t need to read any of this to enjoy the genre, but it is nice to know it is there to read and much of it well worth knowing. You may even find some new favorites — I certainly have over the years, from the Joe Jenkings stories to the Nyctalope, a proto French superman who can see in the dark and is virtually immortal and battles everything from science fictional adversaries to somewhat Bondish super villains.
October 9th, 2010 at 4:29 am
John Thorndyke’s Cases was the first volume of Thorndyke short stories, published in 1909. then we had The Singing Bone (1912), Dr. Thorndyke’s Casebook (1923), The Puzzle Lock (1925) and The Magic Casket (1927).
I think Hodder published a story omnibus around 1951 that has most of them?
It’s interesting how he pulled off the story and novel forms. While he was one among many great mystery novelists, I’d put him at the top in the short story form, along with Doyle and Chesterton (the latter so different!). Then Bailey and Bramah.
A very helpful list. I confess some of the older classics haven’t bowled me over, but there are a lot of surprises out there (lesser works by Braddon and Collins for example). Leavenworth Case was a disappointment though. Good plot, but the rhetoric of the characters was awful. They don’t talk like human beings, they make formal orations. I know this was more common then, but it seems extreme even by the standards of the time. It’s what makes Dickens so pleasant to read–he had a real ear for language that lesser writers lacked.
October 9th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Curt
I’m no Greene fan either, and not ‘bowled over’ by LEAVENWORTH. It’s one of those classics that give classics a bad name. Braddon, as you say can be fun though.
Re Cases, I just went by my copy which didn’t have the first publication date. Should have looked it up, though historically the SINGING BONE is the important collection because of the inverted story form.
I agree on Freeman as a short story writer. In both the Thorndyke and Romney Pringle stories he shows an extraordinary skill at the form. I enjoy the Thorndyke novels, but he functions best in the short form where, as you say, he rivals some of the masters, in fact, is one of the masters.
While I like Collins I prefer Le Fanu to some extent. Gabiorou took me a while to get into, but once I did I enjoyed several of the novels (not all mystery novels even when Lecoq is present).
I debated including any Fortune Du Boisgoby on the list, but decided he wasn’t really first rate and too hard to find for most readers.
I really should have divided this list in two with the second half beginning with Conan Doyle. From there on almost all the books listed are not only readable, but clearly in the field. Many of the books before that are related mostly by their influence on the later ones.
There were some fairly obscure books I debated putting on the list and in the end decided against. For instance Sue’s MYSTERIES OF PARIS started a whole school with virtually every major city in Europe getting it’s own MYSTERIES, including London and Prague. One or two of those were worth reading, but not really influential with the exception of Ponson Du Terraill’s Rocambole novel THE MYSTERIES OF LONDON, but while I know the story, alas it is one I haven’t read.
And for all the French books on this list it is very Anglo and American centric. Hoffman and Heller are about the only writers mentioned who aren’t English, American, or French, but there are Spanish, Italian, German, and other writers who probably should be included. Karl May’s five book sequence set in the Middle East and featuring hero Kara Ben Nemsi details an epic battle against a Mid-Eastern cross between Moriarity and the Mahdi and certainly influenced the novel of adventure and international intrigue, and it is in print as well, but in the end I decided it was mostly associational.
For that matter many a mad scientist in the genre owes more than a little to Verne and Wells.
But then you can end up including everything ever published from Gilgamesh on and I tried to limit myself to fairly direct influences.
Some of the older books are surpizingly modern reads though. I think many readers would enjoy Godwin’s CALEB WILLIAMS without having to make too many adjustments in their mental state. It is a much more modern read than his daughter Mary’s FRANKENSTEIN.
January 10th, 2011 at 8:06 pm
[…] eras, David Vineyard submitted “100 Important Books From Before the Golden Age,” a list of titles not all of which were intended to be Detective Novels, but each of which he felt were progenitors […]
December 16th, 2017 at 7:45 pm
Have you read this? Written in 1900 no less. Good insight into the rise of the detective.
http://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-19th-century-detective-novel-by-h-l.html?m=1