Coming spring 2009 from Penguin Classics

In 2009 Michael will be be reading from this book and talking about the wonderful caper stories of the Victorian and Edwardian eras at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, and many other places. Check the calendar page.

AN EXCERPT FROM MICHAEL SIMS’S INTRODUCTION:

When I first became interested in crime fiction’s little subgenre of caper stories, I went looking for an anthology about these charming miscreants. To my surprise, I searched in vain. No such volume existed. Although the important detectives of the era had been herded into a lineup again and again, the great con artists and burglars had mostly eluded capture. So eventually I suggested to Penguin that together we remedy this oversight. In the present volume, for the first time, the best crooks of the Gaslight era are gathered in one place.

Our party includes distinguished guests from outside the field of mystery and detection. Who but the dustiest of scholars remembers that American Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis and British novelist Arnold Bennett wrote an occasional crime story? We all know that H. G. Wells published visionary science fiction, mainstream novels, and nonfiction—but his light-hearted burglar tale herein may surprise you. Most collections of short fiction by O. Henry omit his crime stories, other than the sentimental account of safecracker Jimmy Valentine, and thereby miss the adventures of his itinerant con men in smalltown America. William Hope Hodgson, renowned for his supernatural fiction, also wrote a volume of stories about a wily smuggler.