About this item
This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction. Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus -- but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe's French detective Dupin, the hero of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," anticipated Holmes' deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his "tales of ratiocination." In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes' adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe -- and to mile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If "Rue Morgue" was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested.
About the Author
Dr Graeme Davis was born 1965 in Kent, UK and educated at Chislehurst & Sidcup Grammar School and the University of St Andrews. He has worked variously as lecturer in English Language & Linguistics and EFL at UK universities. He is an author, academic editor, and researcher as well as Associate Lecturer with The Open University. A specialist in mediaeval language and literature, with interests in the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Iceland, Greenland and the North Atlantic, his writing includes also popular history, popular lexicography and literary criticism of the works of Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and of Dan Brown.
