Wilkie Collins (1814-1889) You don’t know the detective novel intimately till you have read The Moonstone or The Woman in White. They give you a chilly feel of how the mystery genre evolved- from the crucial point when the Dickensian yarn begins to sproutsuch sensational elements as a fabled Hindu diamond, a classic country house [...]

Arts

Pioneers of ‘whodunit’

This week on lockdown reading we look at some pioneering writers of the whodunit who set the tone for the later ‘golden age’. All these books are available free online.
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Wilkie Collins (1814-1889)

You don’t know the detective novel intimately till you have read The Moonstone or The Woman in White. They give you a chilly feel of how the mystery genre evolved- from the crucial point when the Dickensian yarn begins to sproutsuch sensational elements as a fabled Hindu diamond, a classic country house theft,or a mysterious lady in white.

They are both big rambling Victorian novels that later inspired Sherlock Holmes. But despite their size, they keep a pace that can easily outdo the generally corpulent gentleman of those times. The two other sensational novels by Collins to cherish are No Name and Armadale. After these four books, Collins began to slump because he tried to mix in a lot of social commentary. (The poet Swinburne said: “What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—’Wilkie! Have a mission.’”)

All available on freeclassicebooks.com

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Father Brown mysteries enter this list because few today read him. It was this little Roman Catholic priest invented by Chesterton who probably began the craze for oddball detectives- triggering egg-shaped Poirot and the sharp-eyed Miss Marple. There is a touch of the sinister and the grotesque in the stories- but the plots are unbeatable and the whole thing is more literary than Sherlock Holmes or any of the ‘silver haired ladies’ like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers.

Father Brown, unlike Sherlock Holmes, was intuitive in his approach rather than deductive- on the premise that “a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil”. The 53 Father Brown short stories are rich feasts for the senses- and they are among the most literarily elevated whodunits ever.

Read on gutenberg.org and archive.org

Gaston Leroux (1868-1927)

Leroux invented the French Sherlock Holmes Joseph Rouletabille- suave, very young (18 in the first novel), “cool-headed, unfazeable, nonchalant”.

His Mystery of the Yellow Room was a classic locked room mystery while inThe Secret of the Nightthe cocky intrepid young thing is employed by no less than Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to save the life of one of his generals.

Both books available on gutenberg.org 

Baroness Emmuska Orczy(1865-1947)

The author best known for The Scarlet Pimpernel wrote three collections of short stories featuring three very unusual detectives.

The Old Man in the Corner features an unnamed armchair detective- who examines and solves crimes in the corner of a genteel London tea room while conversing with a lady journalist. The elegant dried prune of a man looks into a murder in the London underground, the death of a lady doctor and murders in Bohemian quarters among others- relying on newspaper accounts.

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard features in twelve mysteries she gets to solve because she “recognized domestic clues foreign to male experience”.

Skin O’ My tooth, also titled Patrick Mulligan, features a very homely looking lawyer who works hard to get his clients off- solving the cases himself. These include The Murder in Saltashe Woods, The Case of the Polish Prince and The Duffield Peerage Case.

Read all three books on gutenebrg.net.au

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