84 books like The Mysteries of London

An exuberant serial novel by Regency sporting journalist Egan, illustrated by a young George Cruikshank (Dickens’ future artist). In it, three friends (based on the author, Cruikshank, and his younger brother Robert), document their ‘rambles and sprees through the metropolis’. It is a tale of dandies on safari written entirely in ‘flash’ slang, the language of the 19th-century underworld. The book was a publishing sensation, inspiring Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. I was introduced to this by my dear friend the late Professor Roger Sales many years ago, and it has been inspiring me ever since as a novelist and cultural historian. Egan’s style is bawdy and irreverent, until his voice was silenced by Victorian propriety a generation later. Can also be read as early social investigation.  

This is the first of the ‘Newgate novels’ or ‘criminal romances’ that essentially heralded the start of modern crime fiction. After the death of Walter Scott and before the rise of Dickens, Lytton, like his contemporary W.H. Ainsworth, was the bestselling English novelist of his day; a position both men continued to share with Dickens until the late-1840s. Paul Clifford is a redemptive tale of a fictional Georgian highwayman, full of adventure and intrigue, underpinned by a social message about the link between poverty and crime. Imprisoned for an offence he didn’t commit, the hero emerges apprenticed in crime and ready to use these skills to survive. Paul Clifford is now only remembered, if it is remembered at all, for its opening line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’

As Ainsworth’s future biographer, discovering this remarkable novel in a secondhand bookshop in the early-1990s is what started it all for me. Illustrated by George Cruikshank and originally serialised in 1834, Rookwood made its author famous overnight. His intention was to revive the gothic romance and relocate the form from Europe to England, deploying family curses, ruined castles, and corrupt aristocratic lines. The project was further enlivened by the inclusion of a raucous band of gypsies, numerous (Egan-inspired) ‘Flash’ songs, and the Georgian highwayman Dick Turpin as a primary character. All the legends the English take for granted about Turpin, Black Bess, and his ride to York originate in the pages of Ainsworth’s dark and racy romance. This forgotten classic was one of the biggest books of the 19th century.

Discovered and first published by W.H. Ainsworth, ‘Ouida’ – named from a childhood mispronunciation of ‘Louise’ – went on to become a prolific and bestselling novelist. Her style was melodramatic, intense, and bodice-ripping, her novels usually set against a society or military background. She wrote forty-five novels, Under Two Flags being the most successful. She remained popular until the early 1890s and, like Ainsworth, was granted a Civil List pension for her services to literature. Also like Ainsworth, she is not much read nowadays. In the novel, the profligate hero fakes his own death to avoid gambling debts and exiles himself to Algeria, joining the Chasseurs d’Afrique, the forerunner of the French Foreign Legion. A long way from the moralising tone of much Victorian fiction, ‘Ouida’ always keeps it racy and swashbuckling. 

I dreamed for many years of writing a book about crime fiction. I’m primarily a crime novelist, but so was Julian Symons, and the experience of writing fiction is invaluable when discussing other writers and understanding what they were trying to do. I approached Oxford University Press, with a view to producing a Companion about the genre, comprising essays by writers including myself. This led to a fruitful meeting with an OUP editor and novelist, Michael Cox, but the project was stillborn when his American colleagues had commissioned just such a book, to be edited by Rosemary Herbert. Rosemary invited me to contribute twenty-odd essays to her Companion, and I found the work of my fellow contributors (including Symons) a delight to read.

A precursor to Dracula, and largely forgotten today in the mainstream, the globe-hopping adventures of Varney bring to mind many spy adventure tales.

In this novel, one of the original “penny dreadfuls” the episodic tone (due to its original publication as a continuing weekly serial from 1845-1847), contributes to the espionage feel, especially as Varney takes on a cover as “Baron Stolmuyer Saltsburgh” in order to further his activities.

Also notable is, among the other vampiric Gothic traits displayed by Varney, he is also able to be revived by moonlight, a trope which is now more attributed to werewolves.

Frayling’s book is very much a forerunner of Groom’s, being one of the first serious (but also immensely readable) studies of the vampire in culture. This one keeps its sights trained more on the nineteenth-century vampire. It begins with The Vampyre, the story written by John Polidori at the Villa Diodati at the same infamous gathering that spawned Marty Shelley’s Frankenstein. Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician, but the two men fell out badly, and Polidori’s aristocratic bloodsucker Lord Ruthven is widely regarded as modeled on Byron. Although now little remembered, The Vampyre began the Victorian craze for vampires that culminated in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Frayling is the perfect guide, being not only a cultural historian of wide learning but also a splendid communicator.

Henry Mayhew’s sprawling record of nineteenth-century London can be overwhelming, but his ear for the vernacular and eye for weird detail means that the reader can dip in and find something.

London’s population exploded in the nineteenth century, bulked out by a huge number of itinerant workers. Mayhew interviews these people–in the prologue to the first volume, he describes himself as a "traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor"–and because he gives no judgment on their lives, the book feels more like a modern documentary.

The voices are one thing; Mayhew’s statistics are another–"expenditure in ham sandwiches supplied by street sellers is £1,820 yearly…a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches." Anyone who thinks that Dickens’ writes grotesques should read this. The first book that really brought old London alive for me. 

Do not be put off by the fact this book, and the others in the Sally Lockhart quartet, are often marketed as children’s/YA literature. Like the best of fiction, they transcend categorisation.

The Ruby in the Smoke introduces us to the indomitable Sally Lockhart, orphaned and forced to uncover the secret behind her father’s death. She’s feisty and fiercely independent, navigating her way in a world where the chips are stacked against her. Pullman provides us with an impeccably researched foray into the 1870s, all wrapped up in a hugely entertaining read. 

This is another historical mystery but it's set in a different time period than Huber's mysteries.

The main character of this book has been hired as an assistant to a detective in Victorian England and through the course of the book, I learned a great deal about the history of law enforcement. I think we take so much for granted in our high-tech, always-connected world.

It's surprising and sometimes amazing to realize how the world functioned before telephones, automobiles, and a unified law enforcement department.