Ruth the Betrayer; Or, the Female Spy (Valancourt Classics)

Ruth the Betrayer; Or, the Female Spy (Valancourt Classics) PDF Author: Edward Ellis
Publisher: Valancourt Books
ISBN: 9781948405225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1138

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Book Description
One of the most thrilling of Victorian penny dreadfuls and possibly the first novel to feature a female detective, Ruth the Betrayer returns to print for the first time in over 150 years Ruth Trail leads a double life, working as a spy or informant for the London police while secretly executing her own black deeds of theft and murder. Over the course of the unflagging, action-packed 1100-page plot, we follow Ruth's criminal career as she uses her wits and beauty to gain wealth and power. Along the way, as we pass through the horrors of prisons, convents, and the criminal underworld, we meet a cast of memorable characters, including the murderous ruffian Death's Head, escaped convict Jack Rafferty, the sinister schemer Eneas Earthworm and his victim Alice Trevellyan, wrongly accused as a murderess, the bumbling but charming Captain Charley Crockford, and the unlucky Cadbury Kid. Originally published in weekly installments in 1862-63, Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy returns to print at last in this new edition, which includes an introduction and annotations by Dagni A. Bredesen, all 51 illustrations from the original edition, and an appendix featuring additional contextual material.

Ruth the Betrayer; Or, the Female Spy (Valancourt Classics)

Ruth the Betrayer; Or, the Female Spy (Valancourt Classics) PDF Author: Edward Ellis
Publisher: Valancourt Books
ISBN: 9781948405225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1138

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the most thrilling of Victorian penny dreadfuls and possibly the first novel to feature a female detective, Ruth the Betrayer returns to print for the first time in over 150 years Ruth Trail leads a double life, working as a spy or informant for the London police while secretly executing her own black deeds of theft and murder. Over the course of the unflagging, action-packed 1100-page plot, we follow Ruth's criminal career as she uses her wits and beauty to gain wealth and power. Along the way, as we pass through the horrors of prisons, convents, and the criminal underworld, we meet a cast of memorable characters, including the murderous ruffian Death's Head, escaped convict Jack Rafferty, the sinister schemer Eneas Earthworm and his victim Alice Trevellyan, wrongly accused as a murderess, the bumbling but charming Captain Charley Crockford, and the unlucky Cadbury Kid. Originally published in weekly installments in 1862-63, Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy returns to print at last in this new edition, which includes an introduction and annotations by Dagni A. Bredesen, all 51 illustrations from the original edition, and an appendix featuring additional contextual material.

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective PDF Author: Sara Lodge
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300277881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account--and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

The Big Book of Female Detectives

The Big Book of Female Detectives PDF Author: Otto Penzler
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0525434755
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 2582

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Book Description
Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology brings together the most cunning, resourceful, and brilliant female sleuths in mystery fiction. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. For the first time ever, Otto Penzler gathers the most iconic women of the detective canon over the past 150 years, captivating and surprising readers in equal measure. The 74 handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting P.I.s like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Linda Barnes, Laura Lippman, and many more.

The Notting Hill Mystery

The Notting Hill Mystery PDF Author: Charles Warren Adams
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1464204810
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder "The book is both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it." —New York Times Book Review The Notting Hill Mystery was first published between 1862 and 1863 as an eight-part serial in the magazine Once a Week. Widely acknowledged as the first detective novel, the story is told by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, who is building a case against the sinister Baron R—, who is suspected of murdering his wife. Henderson descends into a maze of intrigue including a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, slow-poisoners, a rich uncle's will and three murders. Presented in the form of diary entries, letters, chemical analysis reports, interviews with witnesses and a crime scene map, the novel displays innovative techniques that would not become common features of detective fiction until the 1920s.

Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence

Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence PDF Author: Wesley K. Wark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135186979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book won the Canadian Crime Writers' Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Genre Criticism/Reference book of 1991. This collection of essays is an attempt to explore the history of spy fiction and spy films and investigate the significance of the ideas they contain. The volume offers new insights into the development and symbolism of British spy fiction.

The Gothic Ideology

The Gothic Ideology PDF Author: Diane Long Hoeveler
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783160497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.

The Foundling. A Comedy, in Five Acts

The Foundling. A Comedy, in Five Acts PDF Author: Edward Moore (of Abingdon.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description


Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture

Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319693115
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
In contrast to the main body of current Victorian detective criticism, which tends to concentrate on Conan Doyle’s creation and only uses other detectives as a backdrop, the texts gathered in this volume examine various contemporary ways of (re)presenting real and fictional detectives that originated in or are otherwise associated with that era: Inspector Bucket, Sergeant Cuff, Inspector Reid, Tobias Gregson, Flaxman Low, and psychiatrists as detectives. Such a collection allows for a critical re-assessment of both the detectives’ importance to the Victorian literature and culture and provides a better basis for understanding the reasons behind their contemporary returns, re-imaginings and re-creations, contributing to the creation of a base for further cultural and critical works dealing with reworkings of the Victorian era.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian. A Melo-dramatic Romance, in Three Acts. [Adapted from Sir Walter Scott's Novel.]

The Heart of Mid-Lothian. A Melo-dramatic Romance, in Three Acts. [Adapted from Sir Walter Scott's Novel.] PDF Author: Thomas John Dibdin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description


Polly Honeycombe. A Dramatic Novel, in One Act

Polly Honeycombe. A Dramatic Novel, in One Act PDF Author: George Colman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description