Subtitled Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009) collects twelve stories originally published between 1896 and 1919 — an era which I find myself increasingly interested in, giving birth as it did to the Golden Age of the 1920s-40s.
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As discussed previously, Tuesdays in February will feature four collections of short stories on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list, selected on account of my ever-growing interest in what the genre looked like before the advent of the Golden Age in (no arguments here…) 1920. Confusingly, my 1950 green Penguin paperback of gentleman thief Raffles stories by E.W. Hornung shown above contains 14 tales, only the first eight of which concern us today, comprising as they do the first collection to feature the character, The Amateur Cracksman (1899).
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That title is doing a lot of work, isn’t it? Fair warning: this goes on a bit.
At the online Bodies from the Library conference last weekend, I gave a talk inspired in part by E.M. Wrong’s introduction to the 1926 anthology Crime and Detection. And, in addition to coining the term “Wellington of detection” that inspired the thinking I laid out last weekend, there is plenty of material in that piece of prose to get the cogs turning.
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I hope I’ll finish this undertaking before another year passes, but with the end of November upon us this is my last post on the Knox Decalogue for this year. So, what have we got?
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The Invisible Event 