Victorian England

  • Crime: Beneath the Antimacassars

    I like a dark, creepy Victorian crime novel — the real doozies – stories so strange and bizarre, nobody’s thought of them yet. The Thing about Thugs by Tabish Khair is a doozy. The Victorian mystery as we know it is turned on its head, so to speak, with a “normal” scientist, Captain William T.… Continue reading

  • Crime: Imagining Jack the Ripper

    Whitechapel, London, 1888 Would Sherlock Holmes identify Jack the Ripper using his astute powers of deduction? Arthur Conan Doyle never put Holmes on the Whitechapel set, but Lyndsay Faye pits the pipe-smoking, cognitively-advanced detective against the Ripper with disastrous results in her novel Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John… Continue reading