Reproduction of the original: Johnny Ludlow by Mrs. Henry Wood

The author, Ellen Wood (January 1814 - February 1887) was an English novelist, who wrote under the pen name Mrs. Henry Wood. In her day she was very popular and famous, on par with Charles Dickens. The lead character in these stories, Johnny Ludlow, was an orphan boy living in the country house of Squire Todhetley and the squire's second wife who was also his stepmother. In the course of many stories, he has all kinds of experiences, adventures, and relationships, and the many characters are interconnected rather like a modern soap opera

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalizing tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.