The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries

Otto Penzler (Editor)

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler—“detective fiction’s best editor and champion” (The Washington Post)—returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants.

Behind the velvet curtains of horsedrawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. With his latest title in the Big Book series, Otto Penzler is cracking cases and serving up the most thrilling, suspenseful Victorian mysteries.

This collection brings together incredible stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Guy de Maupassant among other legendary writers of the grand era of the British Empire. So brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

• ISBN10: 0593311027
• ISBN13: 9780593311028
• Publish Date: 19 October 2021
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 640
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780593311028

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries is another well curated anthology of classic Victorian crime short fiction edited by Otto Penzler. Released 19th Oct 2021 by Penguin Random House on their Vintage Crime / Black Lizard imprint, it's 640 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is an eclectic and broad collection of stories from disparate authors both famous and lesser known from the Victorian era. The stories are grouped roughly thematically: Detective Stories, Crime Stories, International Stories, and American Stories. There are (by my count) 49 stories from a varied stable of authors which includes Oscar Wilde, Poe, Doyle, H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and other titans of English literature. Some of the stories will be familiar to most readers (The Lady, or the Tiger and The Purloined Letter make an appearance) but there were many which were delightfully unfamiliar to me.

As always, Mr Penzler's erudite introductions and background history are one of my main delights with these collections - there are more than a dozen such at this point. I enjoyed quite a lot of these and even enjoyed reading a few of them aloud together (fun road trip activity, passengers read, drivers drives:).

Four and a half stars. Diverting and worthwhile. This would be also be a superb choice for library acquisition, gifting, or for the home library.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.