Collections of short stories are often a "mixed bag". In many ways, that's because not all of us have the same taste, so it's great to have stories that cater to many types of readers. In others, it's because the editor wants to get fans of certain authors interested, so the editor gets a few "big names" and then some lesser known or even new authors. And, even though sometimes that leads to misunderstanding, it also can be good for the reader, as we then get to find a new favorite author.
Here, none of the authors can really be counted as "new" as most of them wrote back in the time of Queen Victoria. Of course we have the seminal Victorian detective (in fact, perhaps The Great Detective), Sherlock Holmes, but we also have Dupin, Mark Twain, and other favorites.
Of course, every editor has a slant- and here Michael Sims wants to show us that women also wrote mysteries and there were also plenty of tales back then of woman detectives, something many of us weren't familiar. Of course, when you introduce lesser known writers, sometimes the writer isn't up to par (but then, who can really compare to Mark Twain and A. Conan Doyle). Still, I enjoyed many of these stories quite a bit. "The Murder at Troyte's Hill" by Catherine Louisa Pirkis was quite interesting as it featured a woman as a known respected PROFESSIONAL detective.
It starts out with the editors own well written intro to detective fiction, especially the history of said stories:
"In the long view of history, detectives are a recent phenomenon. Crime is not. As archaeologists often demonstrate, deception, theft, and violence haunted society even before we left caves or invented agriculture. Consequently, because our imagination is as natural as our penchant for brutality, crime has flourished as a cultural theme from Antigone to Law & Order.
Many people think that Sherlock Holmes was among the earliest detectives in literature. In The Dead Witness, however, he doesn't appear chronologically until about halfway through, because he had numerous ancestors. Among the legion of villains and heroes in world literature are a handful of fascinating proto-detectives who waxed Sherlockian long before Loveday Brooke and November Joe and the other characters you will meet in this book. These figures insist upon the importance of justice and evidence in criminal cases -- rather than accusation and torture -- or demonstrate a rational approach to problem solving. They pay attention and theorize about what they observe. While the stories in this volume are adventurous, suspenseful, and sometimes amusing, the detectives in them behave in many ways like scientists, luxuriating in the act of reasoning while benefitting from its practical results.
The biblical Daniel seems to have been the first fictional detective. Aside from his roles as interpreter of dreams, tamer of lions, killer of dragons, and spouter of visions and prophecies, Daniel participates in a couple of thorny criminal cases. First he solves the earliest locked-room mystery on record, which is also an expose of the follies of idol worship. ...."
I am giving this ***** even tho some of the stories aren't quite up to snuff.
