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A review by archytas
The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories by Michael Sims
4.0
I have one rule with my Goodreads tags - everything gets either fiction or non-fiction, so I can track the relative balance in what I read. This is the first book to give me serious trouble with that designation. That's because while this works as a collection of detective fiction, it works even better as an overview of the emergence of the genre, and it is as the latter that I would strongly recommend it.
The introductions to each story, like the introduction to the book, are excellent (marred only slightly in the ebook edition by bad chapter encoding ensuring that the introduction to the next story is included in the chapter with the preceding one. Someone should fix that). Learning about the role of natural science and paleontology in inspiring the developments, for example, led to one of those "of course" moments. And if not all the stories are successful, or in fact fiction, their inclusion adds something in most cases. ( An exception would be a couple of the big names, Mark Twain in particular, whose excerpt seemed neither influential nor very interesting.) It's interesting to note the different styles between Britain and North America, a gap that seems to widen over time. The exploration of female detectives is also interesting.
The introductions to each story, like the introduction to the book, are excellent (marred only slightly in the ebook edition by bad chapter encoding ensuring that the introduction to the next story is included in the chapter with the preceding one. Someone should fix that). Learning about the role of natural science and paleontology in inspiring the developments, for example, led to one of those "of course" moments. And if not all the stories are successful, or in fact fiction, their inclusion adds something in most cases. ( An exception would be a couple of the big names, Mark Twain in particular, whose excerpt seemed neither influential nor very interesting.) It's interesting to note the different styles between Britain and North America, a gap that seems to widen over time. The exploration of female detectives is also interesting.