Hidden gems from the earliest days of mystery fiction. The years 1850-1905 represent the pre-Golden Age of crime writing. Drawn exclusively from those earliest days of mystery fiction, this revealing anthology includes a surprising number of authors not commonly associated today with crime fiction - names like Alexander Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stephenson, Arnold Bennett, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Over three-quarters of the stories in this fascinating volume have not been reproduced since the 1950s. They include: Guy de Maupassant's The Hand; Charles Dickens's Hunted Down; Maurice LeBlanc's gentleman-burglar Arsene Lupin; Conan Doyle's The Adventures of the Three Students; Robert Louis Stephenson's Markheim; Edgar Poe's Chevaller Auguste Dupin, the first genuine fictional detective; Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner; and EW Hornung's immensely popular thief Raffles.