Announcing the Curated Crime Collection

Tim Prasil

Dec 10

Very soon, the first three volumes of the Curated Crime Collection will be available for purchase. The series is something a bit new for Brom Bones Books. Here's how I summarize it:

The Curated Crime Collection showcases works of fiction whose central characters are criminals, culled from a wave of such literature that rose in the late 1800s and subsided in the early 1900s.

I wrote an introduction to the series and titled it "A Searchlight Can Serve as a Spotlight." There, I discuss how critics from those decades acknowledged that criminals had figured prominently in prose fiction and a variety of other narrative forms for centuries. However, they also identified a new wave of such stories rising shortly after Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes had become an international sensation. It's as if some writers wanted to take advantage of the burst of popularity in mystery fiction by inventing variations on Moriarty (or Adler or Milverton, etc.) rather than creating yet another spin on Holmes himself.

Grant Allen (1848-1899) had a key role in rejuvenating fiction focused on a criminal character. This portrait comes from the December, 1899, issue of The Bookman.

But this renewed interest in criminal characters worried several of those critics. They warned that putting criminals at center stage -- be they thieves or murderers -- would corrupt impressionable youth. It's same argument that, at various times, has been aimed novels altogether, comic books, TV shows, video games, and more.

Meanwhile, during the late 1800s/early 1900s, a new science dubbed "Criminology" developed amid debates over the causes of crime and the best methods to prevent and penalize it. Add to this daring ideas about whether morality is a fixed system created by God -- as certain as cosmological physics -- or a much more fluid notion created by humanity -- as inconsistent as individual consciences.

As I discuss in "A Searchlight Can Serve as a Spotlight," this swirl of trends, worries, and debates helps explain why criminals became a fascinating topic for fiction writers to explore as the nineteenth century evolved into the twentieth. My essay is available here and on the information page for the first phase of the series. It will also be in the first volume.

The first three books in the Curated Crime Collection should be available for purchase before the end of the year.

-- Tim