Classics

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This collection was compiled by Tony Burton, founder of Crime and Suspense. We are still in the process of moving all the stories to the new web site. -ed.

Here are some classic crime, mystery and suspense stories - the ones that started it all.

Once before I posted a story by Elia W. Peattie here. She wrote, as I observed before, spooky mystery stories rather than crime mysteries. For all of that, however, she gives us a remarkable window into Victorian life with her stories. Here is another:

The Room of the Evil Thought by Elia W. Peattie, published in a collection titled THE SHAPE OF FEAR AND OTHER GHOSTLY TALES, in 1898

The third story below here (The Second Bullet) was written by the Victorian-era author, Miss Anna Katherine Green. Lest you think she wrote ONLY short stories, here is one of her novels in its entirety. It is

The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow
by Anna Katherine Green

Published in 1917

Once more, here is a Sherlock Holmes mystery to tantalize the tangled neurons of your brain.

The Adventure of the Red Circle
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Here is a story which is often subtitled "The Sequel to the Murder in the Rue Morgue". Although set in Paris, it is actually based upon a still-unsolved murder which occurred in New York in 1841.

The Mystery of Marie Roget
by Edgar Allan Poe

Here again is a story by a female detective author of the Victorian era, Miss Anna Katharine Green. She was actually a very prolific writer, and in addition to her short stories, wrote several mystery novels. Here, read about a tragedy that befalls a family, and how Miss Violet Strange solves the mystery of

The Second Bullet
by Anna Katharine Green

Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton was born in 1874 in England. He was a prolific writer, creating poetry, essays and numerous stories. He created a series of mystery/crime stories about a crime-solving priest named Father Brown. Here is one of those stories.

The Blue Cross
by G. K. Chesterton

Once more, here is a story by Mr. Charles Dickens, Esq. Dickens lived in a time of great engineering and scientific advancement (at least compared to the previous 500 years or so), but also in a time of tremendous superstition. Here is part of a story he "conducted" rather than wrote. I say conducted because he managed to gather together a number of literati of his day and convince them to write separate sections for the "story", which is actually a collection of vignettes written by different authors, all about different parts of the haunted house. Here is the first part (two chapters), written by Dickens himself. You'll find he exposes a great deal of his sense of humor in this story, though it is of a Victorian turn.

The Haunted House
by Charles Dickens

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is probably the name that most of us connect with early detective and crime stories - at least those of us who grew up in Canada, the USA or Great Britain. While he was not the first, he was certainly one of the most prolific, and remains to this day one of the most respected and often-imitated authors. He always decried the fact that his historical fiction (such as The White Company and Sir Nigel) never achieved the status of his bread-and-butter writings about Sherlock Holmes. Well, for those of you who enjoy Holmes anyway, here is one of his stories that appeared in the Strand magazine in September of 1891.

A Case of Identity
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

So, you think Arthur C. Doyle started it all with Sherlock Holmes and his famous deerstalker cap and violin, eh? Well, here is a story that was written by an American... and published in 1841, 46 years before the first publication of any of the Holmes stories. As you read it, you may notice similarities between Poe's master reasoner and Doyle's. I have no doubt that Doyle was taken with the style and flair of the analytical Dupin. He almost cloned him when he invented Holmes!

(In fact, Holmes himself refers to this very story while working on one of the cases he so masterfully solved!)

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

by Edgar Allen Poe

Lest anyone accuse me of being a male chauvinist porcine, let me say that I DO acknowledge the presence and popularity of female detectives and operatives, even in the Victorian Era. One of the most popular was Violet Strange. Anna Katherine Green wrote novels and short fiction featuring Miss Strange starting about 1878, and going through 1915. Here is one of her short pieces, from a collection published in 1915.

The Golden Slipper

by Anna Katherine Green

 

After Sir A.C. Doyle tired of writing stories of Sherlock Holmes and had intentionally killed him off, the hue and cry was profound and lengthy. Finally, Doyle consented to bring the masterful detective back to life, and he recommenced his harrying of the underworld elements of England and the Continent. One of the tales Doyle wrote soon after Sherlock Holmes's remarkable reappearance on the scene is this story. I hope you enjoy it.

The Adventure of the Norwood Builder

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Another female author of the Victorian period was Mrs. Elia Peattie. But detective stories were not her genre. She inclined more to mysterious stories of strange occurrences. Here is one of her shorter pieces that is both spooky and charming, for all its sentimentality. It was part of a collection of stories entitled "The Shape Of Fear", that was published in 1898.

On Northern Ice

By Elia W. Peattie

When you think of Charles Dickens, what is brought to mind? Christmas, probably, or Martin Chuzzlewit, or perhaps the Pickwick Papers or David Copperfield. Did you know that he also wrote mystery and detective stories, probably most notably the unfinished novel "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"? He also wrote mystery and detective short stories. Here is one of his pieces, inspired by a real-world event of his day.

Hunted Down

By Charles Dickens

With All Saints' Eve, or Hallowe'en, nearly upon us, our thoughts turn to stories of spectral appearances, strange monsters, and horrible hauntings. This is not a new thing for humans. Even in 1800's America, scary stories were popular - especially scary stories with a religious bent to them. Nathaniel Hawthorne came from a line of Puritans, and was inculcated in the theology of Puritanism from an early age. This had an impact on him that we can only begin to imagine. In fact, this story is thought by many scholars to be a way for Hawthorne to exorcise his own "demons" related to his ancestors' participation in the Salem Witch Hysteria. (Sorry, waxed intellectual there for a moment...) Anyway, this is a very interesting horror story with a religious twist. I hope you enjoy it.
(And, yes, this qualifies as a SUSPENSE story!)

Young Goodman Brown

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ambrose Bierce may be best-known by some for his "Devil's Dictionary", a satirical volume of uncommonly humorous and acidic definitions of various terms. But he was a master of the short story, especially those with a macabre viewpoint or a strange twist at the end. He was an unusual, iconoclastic man who lived in a time when much of North America was immersed in conflict - during the Civil War, where he was a soldier in the Ninth Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, as well as the US-Mexican War. His end is as mysterious as some of his stories, because in 1911 he disappeared into the Mexican badlands of Pancho Villa, to be heard from only by letter for the next two years. Exactly where and when he died are both open to conjecture. If you have ever read the novel "The Old Gringo", you have seen one person's idea of what may have happened.

Here are a couple of short-short stories by Bierce, that I hope you will enjoy.

Two by Ambrose Bierce

Dashiell Hammett wrote under a number of pseudonyms. One of them was "Peter Collinson". Hammett wrote only six stories under that pen name, and I'm putting one of them here. Of the six he wrote, the last one credited to Peter Collinson was published in October of 1923. I won't attempt to wax intellectual about Dashiell Hammett - I would be attempting far too difficult a task to try to do so here, in a capsule summary. Just suffice to say, he was the first writer (in my estimation) to take crime and detective fiction and put it at the level of "everyman", to make it down and dirty, as crime really is. Enjoy a taste of a bygone era.

Arson Plus

by Dashiell Hammett, as Peter Collinson