The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (ed. Michael Cox)

Most of the stories in this collection are late Victorian (only three were written before 1870), and for the most part, they aren't that remarkable. Since the detective story and crime writing had such an explosion of popularity in the 1920s-30s (and beyond), most of the devices, crimes and solutions in this collection seem really banal and predictable, as do the characters. The ones I liked best were ones that used Victorian slang and depicted a less confined life than the staid Victorian novel, but unfortunately there weren't many of those. What I noticed most vividly is that an overwhelming number of these stories dealt with middle or lower class characters, very often servants and small businessmen (shopkeepers, tradesmen, etc.). I guess the detective story developed as a genre for and about the non-elite, which I never thought about before. Of all these stories, my favourite was definitely 'The Green Spider' by Sax Rohmer, which is about (sorry, I'm going to give away the ending) a professor who suddenly realises that he made a mistake in a theory he had been developing, and instead of telling others about it or attempting to correct it like a normal person, he fakes his own murder (by a giant glowing green spider), changes his identity, and vanishes. Another good one was 'Cheating the Gallows' by Israel Zangwill, in which a man decides to pretend to be two people for no reason except that he wants to have fun doing it, then steals money from the bank he works at, pretends to run off in the guise of one identity while re-seducing his former fiance in another, and winds up getting executed for his own murder because the police think he killed the other person he was pretending to be. The reason he is executed is that he decides it's just easier to die than explain the situation and get sentenced for stealing from the bank. Besides there delightfully bizarre and quite absurdly funny stories, I didn't think much of the rest, the two stories by Conan Doyle ('The Blue Carbuncle' and 'The Lost Special') were very well-written, but nothing especially captured my attention. The most interesting thing about these stories for me is the variety and vividness of life in the Victorian era that they represent, which I think sometimes tends to be forgotten when the 19th century is always portrayed as staid, prudish, and tradition-bound.