
Murder Mysteries for the Long Christmas Night
Victorian and Edwardian Tales of Gothic Crime, Locked Rooms, and Spectral DetectionBy Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, George MacDonald, Arthur Cheney Train, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, John Kendrick Bangs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Grant Allen, Wilkie Collins, Saki, Fergus Hume, Edgar Wallace, William Douglas O'Connor, Florence Marryat, Catherine Crowe, James Bowker, R. Austin Freeman, J. M. Barrie, E. F. Benson, G. K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, Fred M. White, Sabine Baring-Gould, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frank R. Stockton, Louisa M. Alcott, M.R. James, Leonard Kip, Emmuska Orczy, Lucie E. Jackson, Katherine Rickford, Bithia Mary Croker, Catherine L. PirkisLength55h
About this audiobook
Murder Mysteries for the Long Christmas Night gathers Victorian and Edwardian crime fiction into a seasonally apt meditation on secrecy, domesticity, detection, and moral unease. Its range extends from Gothic hauntings and locked-room puzzles to comic inversions, sensation fiction, psychological suspense, and early procedural inquiry. Against Christmas's conventional imagery of hearth and fellowship, these tales expose concealed resentments, precarious inheritances, uncanny visitations, and the satisfactions of rational reconstruction. Ghostly crimes, country-house enigmas, urban conspiracies, and quietly subversive domestic mysteries make the volume a rich survey of the forms through which popular fiction made murder both frightening and intelligible. The contributors represent a remarkably broad constellation of British, Irish, and American writers whose work helped establish modern mystery writing. Canonical novelists, Gothic fabulists, journalists, humorists, sensation writers, and pioneering women authors converge here, bringing distinct social concerns and formal experiments to the genre. Their collective achievement belongs to the intersecting histories of Victorian sensation, imperial adventure, supernatural fiction, New Woman writing, and the emergent detective tale. Across these traditions, the collection reveals how crime narratives registered anxieties about class, gender, family authority, modern urban life, and the limits of evidence. Ideal for winter reading as well as literary study, this anthology offers an uncommon opportunity to encounter mystery fiction's formative diversity in one volume. Readers will find pleasure in its puzzles and atmospheres while gaining a deeper sense of how varied voices fashioned the conventions of crime writing. Its juxtaposed styles invite sustained comparison and a lively dialogue between reason and terror, social realism and fantasy, festive ritual and murderous disruption.
Audiobook details
GenreMystery and Thriller
Length55 hrs
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateDec 13, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB (Thriller Classic)
2Murder & Crime Mysteries
3The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (Arthur Conan Doyle)
4The Flying Stars (G. K. Chesterton)
5Percival Bland's Proxy (R. Austin Freeman)
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6A Christmas Capture (Fred M. White)
7McAllister's Christmas
8I
9II
10III
11IV
12V
13VI
14The Mystery of Room Five (Fred M White)
15A Policeman’s Business (Edgar Wallace)
16Stuffing (Edgar Wallace)
17Mr Wray’s Cash Box or, the Mask and the Mystery
18I
19II
20III
21IV
22V
23VI
24VII
25VIII
26IX
27X
28The Adventure of the Second Swag (Robert Barr)
29An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (Arthur Conan Doyle)
30A Chaparral Christmas Gift (O. Henry)
31A Christmas Tragedy (Emmuska Orczy)
32The Thieves Who Couldn’t Stop Sneezing (Thomas Hardy)
33Supernatural Mysteries
34The Silver Hatchet (Arthur Conan Doyle)
35What the Shepherd Saw: A Tale of Four Moonlight Nights
36First Night
37Second Night
38Third Night
39Fourth Night
40Markheim (Robert Louis Stevenson)
41The Wolves of Cernogratz (Saki)
42Mustapha
43I
44II
45III
46IV
47The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
48Letter I
49Letter II
50Letter III