LAWRENCE FRANK is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self and of essays on nineteenth-century British and American literature and culture that have appeared in various collections and journals including American Imago, the Dickens Studies Annual, Essays in Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Signs.

'Frank's Victorian Detective Fiction will appeal to historians of science and literary scholars... His analysis is extremely skilful, well written and convincingly argued' - Anne Schwan, Journal of Victorian Culture

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Contexts PART ONE: EDGAR ALLAN POE "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Edgar Allan Poe's Evolutionary Reverie "The Gold-Bug", Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination PART TWO: CHARLES DICKENS Bleak House , the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection and The Mystery of Edwin Drood PART THREE: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Sherlock Holmes and "The Book of Life" Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin and Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles , the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind Epilogue: "A Retrospection" Notes Index