The Crime Wave Rises

THE CRIME WAVE CRESTs
THE CRIME WAVE CRASHES

Moriarty had competition!

The Curated Crime Collection showcases works of fiction whose central characters are criminals, culled from a wave of such literature that rose in the late 1800s and subsided in the early 1900s. “A Searchlight Can Serve as a Spotlight: An Introduction to the Curated Crime Collection,” by editor Tim Prasil, is available here and in the first volume. The three volumes below comprise the first phase of releases: The Crime Wave Rises.

With razor-sharp humor, Grant Allen explores the fickleness of morality in two works. “The Curate of Churnside” (1884) was so daring one publisher apparently required a very different finale from the one found in Allen’s short story collections. Both endings are included here. An African Millionaire (1897) features an ingenious con artist preying on a rich man—one whose own business dealings illustrate how legal isn’t always ethical. Grant’s two works helped ignite a resurgence of fiction about beguiling criminals.

Jenkins Hanby’s street smarts combine with Courtice Jaffrey’s high-society connections to form a felonious friendship in Elizabeth Phipps Train’s A Social Highwayman (1895). In Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers (1897), Simon Carne charms his way into London’s fashionable circles, granting him easy access to their riches. Both novels depict the social elite learning the painful lesson that crimes suffered by their own kind cannot always be blamed on the lower classes. And both novels are contained in this book!

Shortly after Bram Stoker’s Dracula and H.G. Wells’ Martians invaded England, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s science-savvy criminal Madame Koluchy infiltrated London in The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898). Alongside all ten of her tales, this book adds the six featuring the same authors’ Madame Sara, a sinister sister to Koluchy and the title character of The Sorceress of the Strand (1902-03). In both cases, a pair of men struggle to halt the outlaw’s spree. In both cases, their success is, well, highly qualified.

The Crime Wave Crests
tHE CRIME WAVE CRASHES

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