Published in 2018
240 pages
What is this book about?
Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the world’s best-selling mystery author, hailed as the “Queen of Crime,” with worldwide sales in the billions. Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Conan Doyle’s forty-year span.
The truth is that it was due to the success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America; L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy, and Elizabeth Corbett in England; and Mary Fortune in Australia that the doors were finally opened for women crime-writers. Authors who followed them, such as Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Sayers, and, of course, Agatha Christie would not have thrived without the bold, fearless work of their predecessors—and the genre would be much poorer for their absence. So while Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, it is important to remember that she did not ascend that throne except on the shoulders of the women who came before her—and inspired her—and who are now removed from her shadow once and for all by this superb new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger.
Sixteen stories are presented from authors you may not be familiar with. If you are interested in reading stories from female authors who made a difference in the history of crime fiction, this will be a great place to begin your exploration of that subject.
Catherine Crowe – The Advocate’s Wedding Day
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell – The Squire’s Story
Mary Fortune – Traces of Crime
Harriet Prescott Spofford – Mr. Furbush
Ellen Wood – Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings
Elizabeth Corbett – Catching A Burglar
C. L. Pirkis – The Ghost of Fountain Lane
Geraldine Bonner – The Statement of Jared Johnson
Ellen Glasgow – Point in Morals
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace – The Blood-Red Cross
Baroness Orczy – The Regent’s Park Murder
Augusta Groner – The Case of the Registered Letter
M. E. Braddon – The Winning Sequence
Anna Katherine Green – Missing: Page Thirteen
Carolyn Wells – The Adventure of the Clothes-Line
Susan Glaspell – Jury of Her Peers
