East Lynne

A chance meeting with a woman dressed in white on a moonlit road pulls a drawing master into a conspiracy over identity and inheritance. Told through overlapping testimonies, like evidence assembled for a trial.

Wilkie Collins

A diamond taken from an Indian shrine disappears from an English country house, and the investigation runs for two years. Widely considered the first true detective novel in English.

Wilkie Collins

A beautiful young wife with a spotless reputation and a past she has worked very hard to bury. The defining sensation novel, built on bigamy, false identity and a nephew who will not stop asking questions.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Dickens died with this novel half finished, leaving a disappearance, an opium haunted choirmaster and no solution. Read it for the atmosphere, and for the puzzle nobody has ever been able to close.

Charles Dickens

A man is found poisoned in a cab in Melbourne and the driver cannot describe the passenger who left him there. It outsold every detective novel of its decade and still moves quickly.

Fergus Hume