Born Leonard Miller in Belsize Park, London, in 1864 to wealthy Jewish parents, Leonard Merrick began his career as an actor before abandoning the stage in 1884 to try his luck as a novelist. His first novel, Mr. Bazalgette's Agent, was published in 1888 and features a determined and resourceful heroine in the figure of Miriam Lea, who grapples with some very modern dilemmas of female virtue and vice. The novel begins when Lea, having fallen on hard times, answers an advertisement calling for private agents. Within weeks she finds herself in Mr. Bazalgette's employ as a private detective, traveling on a train to Hamburg in pursuit of an audacious fraudster. What follows is a journey through some of the great cities of Europe--and eventually to South Africa--as Lea attempts to track down her man. In 1925, in response to a query about the book's title, Merrick quipped: "It's a terrible book. It's the worst thing I ever wrote. I bought them all up and destroyed them. You can't find any." It seems Merrick was true to his overly self-critical word, as copies of the book can now only be found in private collections and in a handful of university and national libraries throughout the world. This new edition, republished by the British Library for their British Library Crime Classics series, offers modern crime fiction fans the opportunity to rediscover an enticing and rare detective story.

An annual biographical dictionary, with which is incorporated "Men and women of the time."

Sherlock's Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864-1913 examines the fictional female detective in Victorian and Edwardian literature. This character, originating in the 1860s, configures a new representation of women in narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis explores female empowerment through professional unofficial or official detection, especially as this surveillance illuminates legal, moral, gendered, institutional, criminal, punitive, judicial, political, and familial practices. This book considers a range of literary texts by both female and male writers which concentrate on detection by women, particularly those which followed the creation of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. Cultural movements, such as the emergence of the New Woman, property law or suffragism, are stressed in the exploits of these resourceful investigators. These daring women deal with a range of crimes, including murder, blackmail, terrorism, forgery, theft, sexual harassment, embezzlement, fraud, impersonation and domestic violence. Privileging the exercise of reason rather than intuition, these women detectives are proto-feminist in their demonstration of women's independence. Instead of being under the law, these women transform it. Their investigations are given particular edge because many of the perpetrators of these crimes are women. Sherlock's Sisters probes many texts which, because of their rarity, have been under-researched. Writers such as Beatrice Heron-Maxwell, Emmuska Orczy, L.T. Meade, Catherine Pirkis, Fergus Hume, Grant Allen, Leonard Merrick, Marie Belloc Lowndes, George Sims, McDonnell Bodkin and Richard Marsh are here incorporated into the canon of Victorian and Edwardian literature, many for the first time. A writer such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon is reassessed through a neglected novel. The book includes works by Irish and Australian writers to present an inclusive array of British texts. Sherlock's Sisters enlarges the perception of emerging female empowerment during the nineteenth century, filling an important gap in the fields of Gender Studies, Law/Literature and Popular Culture.

"e;I love breaking the rules."e; - Cardiff Jack.Someone was murdering prostitutes, placing their bodies in the Bay and covering them with roses. To the media, he was 'Cardiff Jack', to the rest of us he was a man to avoid and fear. Meanwhile, I was searching for Faye Collister, a prostitute. Why was Faye, a beautiful woman from a privileged background, walking the streets? Why had she disappeared? And what was her connection to Cardiff Jack? As questions tumbled into answers, I made a shocking discovery, a discovery that would resonate with me for the rest of my days. Ripper - the story of a week in my life that reshaped the past, disturbed the present and brought the promise of an uncertain future.

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account--and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.