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This is a short murder-mystery novel. It tells the story of Martin, a criminal who seduces and murders Emily in a bid to marry another woman. Will the other woman find out about Martin's crime?

One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.

This eBook edition of "Powers of Darkness" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Excerpt: "It was as if Martin Faber had come back from the dead—the ghastliness of the idea made Alice shudder. A sudden fear set her trembling from head to foot. She seemed to see the whole mystery laid bare as one sees things in a dream, only to lose sight of them again. Yet Martin Faber was in his grave. It was impossible in the circumstances." Frederick White (1859–1935), mostly known for mysteries, is considered also as one of the pioneers of the spy story.