For eight bucks last winter, on one of my used-book store binges, I picked up a leather-bound, closely printed (in columns), 840 page book called World's Great Detective Stories, published in 1928 by Walter J Black, Inc (never heard of them).
It's about as odd a collection as you can imagine. My guess is that Mr Black, Inc paid for the bare minimum of copyright material by popular mystery-writers, in order to attract readers, and then just filled up the rest of the book with anything old, copyright-expired, and vaguely crime-related that he could get his hands on.
There's a few of the names you'd expect (Poe, Doyle, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace) but there's also excerpts pulled as if at random from writers like Boccaccio, Balzac, Tolstoy, Cervantes and the Thousand and One Nights -- even one excerpt from the Koran. No translators are credited anywhere, 90% of the stories are given no source at all nor even a date, and typos abound.
But the real glory of the book (and I didn't realize this until after I'd bought it and brought it home) are a host of anonymous stories taken out of the penny-dreadfuls of the early Victorian period, which tended to be true crime digests (as opposed to the mid- and late-Victorian penny-dreadfuls, which went more for serial fiction). They're given by-lines like Robber Tales, Prison Chronicles and French Court Records and they range from the merely curious ("Ghosts in Court") to the infamously bizarre ("Sawney Beane").
I was reading a couple of the stories last night, as kind of a palate-cleanser amid all this piracy, mainsprit-jibbing and Madagascarity, and came upon this sweet little proclamation of justice, courtesy of Parisian Criminal Records:
It's about as odd a collection as you can imagine. My guess is that Mr Black, Inc paid for the bare minimum of copyright material by popular mystery-writers, in order to attract readers, and then just filled up the rest of the book with anything old, copyright-expired, and vaguely crime-related that he could get his hands on.
There's a few of the names you'd expect (Poe, Doyle, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace) but there's also excerpts pulled as if at random from writers like Boccaccio, Balzac, Tolstoy, Cervantes and the Thousand and One Nights -- even one excerpt from the Koran. No translators are credited anywhere, 90% of the stories are given no source at all nor even a date, and typos abound.
But the real glory of the book (and I didn't realize this until after I'd bought it and brought it home) are a host of anonymous stories taken out of the penny-dreadfuls of the early Victorian period, which tended to be true crime digests (as opposed to the mid- and late-Victorian penny-dreadfuls, which went more for serial fiction). They're given by-lines like Robber Tales, Prison Chronicles and French Court Records and they range from the merely curious ("Ghosts in Court") to the infamously bizarre ("Sawney Beane").
I was reading a couple of the stories last night, as kind of a palate-cleanser amid all this piracy, mainsprit-jibbing and Madagascarity, and came upon this sweet little proclamation of justice, courtesy of Parisian Criminal Records:
I know, I know, it's an old joke, but it made me laugh out loud. Since his whole family is executed along with him (they having all participated in either killing the old man or covering up the crime), I wonder who they levied the fine from?"Jean-Baptiste -- guilty of murder and parricide -- condemned to have both hands cut off; his arms, legs, and thighs and body to be bruised and broken; afterwards to be fixed upon the wheel, there to linger so long as God shall please; after which, his body to be burned and scattered to the winds. A fine of ten livres to the king."
