Agatha Christie is an author most people have heard of, whether or not they’ve ever read any of her books. Ask someone to think of a female crime writer and she is probably the first name that will come to mind. Christie’s first novel, though, wasn’t published until 1920 – and she was by no means the first woman to write in the crime genre. This new collection of short stories, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, features some of the lesser known women crime writers who came before Agatha and could even have inspired her work.
The book is subtitled Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Female Writers: 1850-1917 and although I wouldn’t personally describe all of these authors as ‘forgotten’, there were certainly quite a few whose names were new to me. Of the sixteen stories included in the book, I had already read one of them – A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell (1917), which shows the different ways in which men and women evaluate the same situation and the different clues they pick up on – but it’s such a good story I was happy to read it again. Other names who may be familiar to many readers are Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and Scarlet Pimpernel author Baroness Orczy, although the stories included here – The Squire’s Story (1853) and The Regent’s Park Murder (1901) – didn’t particularly stand out to me.
As a fan of Victorian sensation novels, I was intrigued to come across stories by Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, two authors whose work I’ve loved in the past. The Braddon one, The Winning Sequence (1896), is more of a ghost story than a mystery and I found it disappointingly weak, but Wood’s story, Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings (1873), was very enjoyable. It is narrated by her young hero, Johnny Ludlow, who is apparently the subject of a whole series of short story collections, although I had never heard of him until now.
Others that I think deserve a special mention include The Statement of Jared Johnson (1899) by Geraldine Bonner, a murder mystery with a twist I’ve come across several times in crime stories recently but which I always find clever, The Ghost of Fountain Lane (1893) by C.L. Pirkis, in which a link emerges between two seemingly unconnected mysteries, and The Case of the Registered Letter by the Austrian author Augusta Groner. There’s also A Point in Morals (1899) by Ellen Glasgow, an unusual story which considers whether murder is always morally wrong, The Blood-Red Cross (1902) by L.T. Meade which features a sinister villain called Madame Sara, and Anna Katherine Green’s Missing: Page Thirteen (1915), an eerie tale of a house with a secret room.
The other authors represented in the book, whose work made less impression on me, are Catherine Crow, Mary Fortune, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Elizabeth Corbett and Carolyn Wells – whose The Adventure of the Clothes-Line (1915) is a parody of a Sherlock Holmes story which I think a lot of readers would enjoy even though I didn’t.
There’s nothing here, in my opinion, which resembles an Agatha Christie story in any way, so the title of this book could be slightly misleading if someone picked it up expecting a selection of Christie-style mysteries. I didn’t find any new authors here that I liked enough to want to explore further, but it was still interesting to read this collection and see how crime fiction has developed over the years.
Thanks to Pegasus Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.
She Reads Novels 
This sounds interesting enough that I immediately put it on my list. I am having a similar experience with a set called Women Crime Writers, which contains eight suspense novels, four from the 1940’s and four from the 50’s, written by lesser known American crime writers. I had only previously read one of them, and so far I’ve liked the ones I’ve read better than more famous ones from the same period written by men. I highly recommend it, even though it’s from a different period than most of those you’ve mentioned in your review.
That sounds like an interesting set of books too. It’s good that so many lesser known authors are being made available again.
Yes, I think so.
Sounds like a good resource, even though it didn’t fully work for you.
It was worth reading as I did enjoy most of the stories, even if there weren’t many that I would describe as outstanding.
It seems they were all writing much earlier than Agatha Christie, so can they really be in her shadow? I think Victorian women writers are generally overlooked, except for the big names like George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell.
This does sound interesting, so I hope it’s available over here.
The title doesn’t make a lot of sense – as you’ve said, these authors weren’t exactly in Agatha Christie’s shadow and her stories have a completely different style and feel to the ones in this book anyway. It’s still an interesting read, though.
Good review! Too bad they decided to use Agatha Christie as “click bait,” since Victorian mystery is a wonderful genre all on its own. I guess there’s a reason famous authors are famous… typically their books stand the test of time better than even authors who were famous in their own day only. 🙂
The title of the book reminds me of a similar anthology I checked out from the library once: “In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe.” I wonder if this is some kind of series?
I don’t think it was necessary to use Agatha Christie’s name – plenty of readers would have been happy to read a collection of Victorian mysteries anyway. It does seem to be part of a series; the Poe book you mention is also edited by Leslie S Klinger and there’s a Sherlock Holmes one too.
What I relate to most in your review is your interest in how crime fiction developed over the years.
Yes, it was interesting. The stories appear in chronological order which made it easier to look for changes in style and structure between the earlier stories and the later ones.