By Oliver Goldsmith.

“When Dr Primrose loses his fortune in a disastrous investment, his idyllic life in the country is shattered and he is forced to move with his wife and six children to an impoverished living on the estate of Squire Thornhill. Taking to the road in pursuit of his daughter, who has been seduced by the rakish Squire, the beleaguered Primrose becomes embroiled in a series of misadventures–encountering his long-lost son in a travelling theatre company and even spending time in a debtor’s prison. Yet Primrose, though hampered by his unworldliness and pride, is sustained by his unwavering religious faith. In The Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith gently mocks many of the literary conventions of his day–from pastoral and romance to the picaresque – infusing his story of a hapless clergyman with warm humour and amiable social satire.”

J.C. Krieger and Company, 1828 300p.

By R.D. Blackmore.

“This work is called a 'romance,' because the incidents, characters, time, and scenery, are alike romantic. And in shaping this old tale, the Writer neither dares, nor desires, to claim for it the dignity or cumber it with the difficulty of an historic novel….Every woman clutched her child, and every man turned pale at the very name of "Doone" ….John Ridd, an unsophisticated farmer, falls in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Lorna Doone, kidnapped as a child by the outlaw Doones on Exmoor. Ridd's rivalry with the villainous Carver Doone reaches a dramatic climax that will determine Lorna's future happiness.”

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878. 280p.

By Charles Reade.

‘Hard Cash like ‘The Cloister and the Hearth' is a matter-of-fact Romance—that is, a fiction built on truths ; and these truths have been gathered by long, severe, systematic labour, from a multitude of volumes, pamphlets, journals, reports, blue-books, manuscript narratives, letters, and living people, whom I have sought out, examined, and cross-examined, to get at the truth on each main topic I have striven to handle. The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them ; and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about Sensation * Novelists ; but in reality those passages have been written on the same system as the nautical, legal, and other scenes : the best evidence has been ransacked ; and a large portion of this evidence I shall be happy to show at my house to any brother writer who is disinterested, and really cares enough for truth and humanity to walk or ride a mile in pursuit of them.” (From Preface)

London: Chatto and Windus, 1899. 625p.

By Honoré de Balzac.

“The Wild Ass's Skin is Honoré de Balzac's 1831 novel that tells the story of a young man, Raphaël de Valentin, who discovers a piece of shagreen, in this case a rough untanned piece of a wild ass's skin, which has the magical property of granting wishes. However the fulfillment of the wisher's desire comes at a cost, after each wish the skin shrinks a little bit and consumes the physical energy of the wisher. "The Wild Ass's Skin" is at once both a work of incredible realism, in the descriptions of Parisian life and culture at the time, and also a work of supernatural fantasy, in the desires that are fulfilled by the wild ass's skin. Balzac uses this fantastical device masterfully to depict the complexity of the human nature in civilized society.”

Philadelphia: Gebbie Publishing, 1897, 324p.

By Charles Dickens.

“The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters—the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness"; the mannish lawyer Sally Brass; Quilp's brow-beaten mother-in-law; and Quilp himself, the lustful, vengeful dwarf, whose demonic energy makes a vivid counterpoint to Nell's purity.”

London: Chapman and Hall, 1840. 460p.

By Arthur Train.

New York: On the trail of the bad men. The district attorney. Human nature in the court room. Animals in court. Foolish laws. Sanctity by statute. Criminal law and common sense. Twelve good women and true. Beware of the dog! Marriage and divorce. Have you a lawyer? Is it a crime to be rich? A man born to be hanged cannot be drowned.

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. 427p.

By A. Conan Doyle.

“ I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie.”

New York: Double, Page, 1908. 176p.

By Mark Twain.

“A young slave woman attempting to protect her son from the horrors of slavery, switches her light-skinned infant with the master's white son. This novel features a literary first — the use of fingerprinting to solve a crime.”

London: Chatto and Windus, 1905. 262p.

By David Balfour .

Being memoirs of the adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751, written by himself and now set forth. “Set in 1751, the flight of David Balfour and Alan Breck across the Highlands of Scotland is based on real events. Though he wrote the book to make money, while living as an invalid in Bournemouth. Stevenson was proud of it; he inscribed a presentation copy with the couplet. Here is the one sound page of all my writing. The one I'm proud of and that I delight in. Rowland Hilder is famous for his paintings of the English countryside but his work in book illustration covered a much wider canvas…. His drawing for Kidnapped were first published in 1930 and have undeservedly, been long out of print. A sixteen-year-old orphan is kidnapped by his villainous uncle, but later escapes and becomes involved in the struggle of the Scottish highlanders against English rule. “

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886. 324p.

By Benjamin P. Eldridge and William B. Watts.

A Faithful Portrayal of the Conflict Between the Criminals of This Age and the Defenders of Society, the Police. “AS we sit in our office chairs, our rival, the rascal, leers down at us through a thousand masks. He is reckless, gay, demure, stolid, dogged, sullen, surly, threatening, desperate. He has the smirk of the confidence man, the furtive glance of the sneak thief, the scowl of the burglar, the menace of the murderer. The moulds of every vice and crime which the world knows are ranged before us in a single group of pictures -- the photographs which compose the Rogues' Gallery. Our rival, the rascal, was born before the beginning of history. He has existed ever since knavery sought to outwit honesty and villainy attacked by force or fraud the natural right of man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the earliest conditions of society the honest man fought the rascal singlehanded Or with the chance help of his neighbors. With the advance of civilization, came the institution of the standing safeguards of watchmen and constables, culminating at length in the great disciplined forces of our city police. From the farthest stretch of tradition down to the present hour society has been fighting our rival, the rascal, day and night, with all its accumulating powers of defence and suppression, and yet the rascal has not been subdued and for ages to come he will doubtless continue to defy the law and infest the earth. Still the advancing experience, organization and deter- mination arrayed against him have succeeded, at least, in making his path in life a painful tramp over rocks and thorns with traps and pitfalls threatening his feet at every step. Between him and the grand organization of the defenders of society, simply summed up in the term, the police, there is an undying rivalry and an incessant contest, the one striving by every hook and crook to blind the eyes or escape the clutch of the other which in turn is constantly spurred on to meet craft with craft and foil every new shift of resourceful villainy by redoubled alertness in detection and capture. In the following pages we have designed to show the rascal of to-day in his multiform bodies and faces. We have distinguished, as sharply, and vividly as we can, the varying types in our Rogues' Gallery. We have depicted the bunco man, the sneak thief, the burglar, the forger—the trickster and ruffian of every known stripe. We have shown what conditions make or mould them, how they plan, how they work, what covers they seek, and how the police in turn plan and work to forestall, deter, detect and capture them.”

Boston, MA: Pemberton Pub. Co, 1897. 433p.

By Sir Walter Scott.

“The Author, on a former occasion, declined giving the real source from which he drew the tragic subject of this history, because, though occurring at a distant period, it might possibly be unpleasing to the feelings of the descendants of the parties. But as he finds an account of the circumstances given in the Notes to Law's Memorials by his ingenious friend Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq., and also indicated in his reprint of the Rev. Mr. Symson's poems, appended to the Description of Galloway as the original of the Bride of Lammermoor, the Author feels himself now at liberty to tell the tale as he had it from connections of his own, who lived very near the period, and were closely related to the family of the Bride.

London: Collins Clear -Type Press, 1900. 416p.

By Arthur B. Reeve..

The early exploits of Craig Kennedy, scientific detective. Contents: Craig Kennedy's theories.--The silent bullet.--The scientific cracksman.--The bacteriological detective.--The deadly tube.--The seismograph adventure.--The diamond maker.--The azure ring.--"Spontaneous combustion."--The terror in the air.--The black hand.--The artificial paradise.--The steel doorNew York: Harper and Brothers, 1910. 390p.

By Arthur Conan Doyle..

13 Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1903-1904. The first story is set in 1894 and has Holmes returning in London and explaining the period from 1891–1894, a period called "The Great Hiatus" by Sherlockian enthusiasts. Also of note is Watson's statement in the last story of the cycle that Holmes has retired, and forbids him to publish any more stories. (Description from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The stories: The Empty House. The Norwood Builder. The Landing Men. The Solitary Cyclist.. The Priory School. Black Peter. Charles Augustus Milverton. Six Napoleons. Three Students. Golden Since-Nez. Missing Three-Quarter. The Abbey Grange. The Second Stain

NY. Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. .(1903-1904) 289 pages.

By Freeman Wills Crofts.

When a cask breaks open in a busy London shipping yard, the discovery of its contents leads to a puzzling case for Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard. As the Inspector begins to trace the mysterious movements of the cask, his investigative procedures bring him to Paris and onto the path of a meticulously plotted murder, one step at a time.

New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924. 342p.

By Chester K. Steele.

Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story. The Diamond Cross Mystery is an excellent detective novel for adults published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the pseudonym Chester K. Steele – one out of the many pen-names used by the producer. The story starts with a murder – a woman is found dead in her own jewelry shop. Her cousin, Mr. Darcy is suspected to have committed the murder, but the first and most obvious suspect is always innocent in good murder mysteries, so the suspect’s fiancée hires the American version of Inspector Clouseau, Colonel Lee Ashley to carry out an investigation of his own. Though everything continues to point to Darcy, the Colonel eventually reveals the identity of the murderer, but not before lots of suspense, unexpected twists and some amazing action. The murder is surrounded by some very strange circumstances – the cause of death is difficult to identify and all the clocks in the shop stop at different times, to mention just two of the puzzles to be ingeniously solved. The detective’s private interests are also involved in the investigation – it is Ashley’s his passion for fishing will help him solve the case eventually.

New York: George Sully & Co., 1918. 331p.

By Mary E. Hanshew and Thomas W. Hanshew.

“…every moment that passes! I am terribly afraid for Father's life, even as I have told Mr. Narkom here. But there are some things which a woman cannot tell. Those things which she feels in her heart--and has no concrete facts with which to explain them. Father will die if you do not come to my rescue immediately. He will die, and by no natural means. I tell you, my father is being poisoned slowly, and because of his very taciturnity none of us can save him! Even now, as I sit here, something tells me that things are not right with him, or with Ross, my brother! All my life long I have had these premonitions. There must be gipsy blood in me, I think. But there it is. Oh, help me to save him, to save my brother Ross's inheritance. And my blessing will go with you to the end of your days!"

Garden City, NY: A.L. Burt, 1922. 328p.

By. A.A. Milne.

This is probably one of the top classics of "golden age" detective fiction. Anyone who's read any mystery novels at all will be familiar with the tropes -- an English country house in the first half of the twentieth century, a locked room, a dead body, an amateur sleuth, a helpful sidekick, and all the rest. It's a clever story, ingenious enough in its way, and an iconic example of Agatha Christie / Dorothy Sayers -type murder mysteries. If you've read more than a few of those kinds of books, you might find this one a little predictable, but it's fun despite that. It's particularly of note, however, because Raymond Chandler wrote about it extensively in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder." After praising it as "an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks," he proceeds to take it sharply to task for its essential lack of realism. This book -- which Chandler admired to an extent -- was what he saw as the iconic example of what was wrong with the detective fiction of his day, and to which novels like "The Big Sleep" or "The Long Goodbye", with their hard-boiled, hard-hitting gumshoes and gritty realism, were a direct response.

New York: E.P. Dutton, 1922. 277p.

By Freeman Wills Crofts.

When a mutilated body is found beside a railway tunnel in Groote Park the tragedy appears a straightforward case of accidental death, but Middeldorp police Detective-Inspector Vandam senses foul play. Vandam begins an investigation into the dead man, Albert Smith, which takes the case from the wilds of South Africa to mountains and glens of Scotland, where a near-identical crime has been perpetrated…

Toronto: T.Allen, 1929. 301p.

By Freeman Wills Crofts.

It seemed an innocent enough puzzle at first, a truck with one number plate when first seen, but another when seen a few hours later. But Seymour Merriman and his friend, Claud Hilliard, soon become convinced that the Pit- Prop Syndicate is a front for some sort of illegal activity. They just can't figure out the what or how. But when one of the members of the syndicate is found murdered in a taxi, it becomes a matter for the professional detectives of Scotland Yard who must solve the secret of The Pit-Prop Syndicate! (From Amazon).

London: W. Collins Sons, 1922. 309p.

By Agatha Christie.

Pretty, young Anne Beddingfeld has come to London looking for adventure. But adventure finds her when a strange-smelling man falls off an Underground platform and is electrocuted on the rails. The police verdict is accidental death. But who was the man in the brown suit who examined the body before running away? Armed with only one cryptic clue, Anne is determined to track him down and bring the mysterious killer to justice.

New York: William Morrow, 1924. 239p.