"The Beetle" by Richard Marsh was first published in 1897, not long after Bram Stoker's "Dracula." 'Dracula' is now world famous, thanks to its early adoption by first the theatre, and then the movies, while 'The Beetle' remains all but forgotten. Yet 'The Beetle' consistently outsold 'Dracula' as long as it was in print: it was THE Gothic novel that terrified more of Victorian London than Dracula ever did. The tale revolves around a mysterious member of 'The Children of Isis', coming to London to seek revenge for an act committed 20 years previously in Cairo. Hypnosis, human/insect...
"The Beetle" by Richard Marsh was first published in 1897, not long after Bram Stoker's "Dracula." 'Dracula' is now world famous, thanks to its early ...
Richard Marsh, Minna Vuohelainen (Lecturer in English at City University of London)
The Valancourt edition includes a very readable and enlightening introduction by Minna Vuohelainen, scholar of Richard Marsh and senior lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill University. In it, one learns about Marsh's somewhat colorful background, including his imprisonment for financial fraud Vuohelainen puts Marsh's history in context and shows how it likely influenced his writing. Also, London was a city going through very many cultural changes and tumultuous events in Marsh's time (including the 1888 Ripper murders), and the introduction describes how events of the time were...
The Valancourt edition includes a very readable and enlightening introduction by Minna Vuohelainen, scholar of Richard Marsh and senior lecturer in En...
Marsh's female detective Judith Lee is unique among the best notable women detectives in 19th-century popular literature. He was still writing Judith Lee stories when he passed away, and his widow issued a final collection in 1916. This omnibus volume includes both collections, as well as a never reprinted story from 1916.
Marsh's female detective Judith Lee is unique among the best notable women detectives in 19th-century popular literature. He was still writing Judith ...
'The Beetle' tells the story of a fantastical creature, ""born of neither god nor man,"" with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician Paul Lessingham through fin de siecle London in search of vengeance for the defilement of a sacred tomb in Egypt. Marsh's novel is of a piece with other sensational turn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker's Dracula, George du Maurier's Trilby, and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels. Like Dracula and many of the sensation novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is narrated from the perspectives of multiple...
'The Beetle' tells the story of a fantastical creature, ""born of neither god nor man,"" with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British pol...
