※凡是犯罪小说，侦探小说的爱好者，绝对不能错过这本经典！
故事设在英国，由保险调查员Ralph Henderson叙述。他在寻找线索证明邪恶的男爵R是故意谋杀他的妻子，为了获得巨大的人寿保险金额。男爵的妻子是在梦游的时候走进男爵的实验室，并喝了一瓶酸。这看起来是个意外，但是Henderson发现男爵在实践发生之前帮妻子保了五次险。Henderson越调查越陷入一个充满阴谋的迷宫，包括一位恶魔似的催眠师，会绑架人的吉普赛族，慢毒害着，一位有钱的叔叔，以及三宗谋杀案。
本书以日记，信件，化学分析报告，证人访问，以及犯罪现场地图呈现，作者使用了先进的创意技巧来说故事，这种技巧是到1920年代才成为侦探小说的常用手法。现在，这本书重新被包装，出版，里面包括了George du Maurier的原始绘图，是这本书原来被连载时搭配的。
关于作者：
Charles Warren Adams 是一位记者，旅游者，律师以及Saunders, Otley& Co.的业主。
这家公司出版了Once a Week杂志，是最初连摘《诺丁山神秘事件》的杂志。
Paul Collins, 《纽约时报》书评：“这本书不仅非常代表它的时代，同时也完全超越了它的时代。”
Sandra Dallas,《丹佛邮报》：“这个推理作品的原始比它所激发的未来作品还熟练巧妙。”
Julia Handford《英国电讯报》: “《诺丁山神秘事件》叙述谋杀案的方法令人惊人的现代。”
First ever detective novel back in print after 150 years
The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix, dating back to 1862, preceded The Moonstone by some years
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 February 2012 08.38 EST
The Notting Hill Mystery ... "The Baron came back and caught me ..." Detail from one of the original illustrations in Once a Week. Photograph: British Library Board
Poisoning, hypnotists, kidnappers and a series of crimes "in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate": The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix, believed to be the first detective novel ever published, is back in print for the first time in a century-and-a-half.
Although Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, published in 1868, and Emile Gaboriau's first Monsieur Lecoq novel L'Affaire Lerouge, released in 1866, have both been proposed as the first fictional outings for detectives, the British Library believes The Notting Hill Mystery "can truly claim to be the first modern detective novel".
Serialised between 1862 and 1863 in the magazine Once a Week, the novel was published in its entirety in 1863 but has been out of print since the turn of the century. It stars the insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, as he works to bring the sinister Baron "R___" to justice for murdering his wife to obtain a large life insurance payout. Using diary entries, letters, crime reports, witness interviews, maps and forensic evidence – "innovative techniques that would not become common features of detective fiction until the 1920s", says the British Library – Henderson's investigation slowly plays itself out, uncovering along the way an evil mesmerist, a girl kidnapped by gypsies, poisoners and three murders.
"Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidence, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate?" asks the author Felix, a pseudonym for the journalist, traveller and lawyer Charles Warren Adams. The story's reception at the time was positive: the Guardian called it "very ingeniously put together", the Evening Herald said that "the book in its own line stands alone", while the London Review appears to be getting to grips with what a detective story actually is, describing The Notting Hill Mystery as "a carefully prepared chaos, in which the reader, as in the game called solitaire, is compelled to pick out his own way to the elucidation of the proposed puzzle".
The author Julian Symons identified The Notting Hill Mystery as the first detective novel in 1972, calling its primacy "unquestionable" and its plot "strikingly modern". The British Library first made the novel available via print-on-demand last March, as part of a collection of hundreds of 19th century novels. While most sold just two to three copies apiece, The Notting Hill Mystery took off following a glowing write-up in the New York Times which identified Adams as its author and described its ending as both "ingenious and utterly mad", selling hundreds of copies and prompting the library to issue its new trade edition this month.
"It's a great read, written in a very matter-of-fact way – as Paul Collins describes it in the New York Times, it's both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it," said commissioning editor Lara Speicher. "At the beginning of the book you know what the crime is, then he gradually leads you through all the events leading up to the crime, and only at the end reveals how it happened. He keeps you going through the book. Modern fans of crime fiction would definitely enjoy it."
The British Library's new edition has been produced using photographs of the original 1863 edition, which featured illustrations by George du Maurier, grandfather of Daphne.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/21/first-detective-novel-notting-hill-mystery
ESSAY
The Case of the First Mystery Novelist
By PAUL COLLINS
Published: January 7, 2011
Reader, never mind whether the butler did it. Here’s a real mystery for you: Who wrote the first detective novel?Enlarge This Image
Engraving from the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration at Cardiff University
For years, the usual suspect was Wilkie Collins, who made the great leap from Poe’s short stories to the Victorian triple-decker novel with “The Moonstone,” published in 1868. Across the Channel, there was Émile Gaboriau and his Monsieur Lecoq, who made his first appearance a few years earlier in “L’Affaire Lerouge,” though Arthur Conan Doyle later had Sherlock Holmes declare Lecoq “a miserable bungler.”In 1975, however, the novelist and critic Julian Symons revealed in The Times of London a veritable hidden panel in the library of detective literature: a third novel that predates them both. It was “The Notting Hill Mystery,” an anonymous eight-part serial that ran in Once a Week magazine starting on Nov. 29, 1862. But the book itself presented something of a mystery.
“It is unnecessary for us to state by what means the following papers came into our hands. . . . ,” the editors of Once a Week declared. And that was just the problem. Symons pointed out that nobody knew who the author — identified by the pseudonym Charles Felix when the novel was released in book form in 1865 — really was.
But reader, I know whodunit.
First, the murders. “The Notting Hill Mystery” begins in London, where the wife of Baron R** dies after sleepwalking into his home laboratory and drinking a bottle of acid. It looks like a tragic accident, until a private investigator, Ralph Henderson, notices that the baron took out five life insurance policies on Madame R**, worth a staggering £25,000. Hired by an insurance company, Henderson descends into a maze of intrigue that is perfectly and deliriously Victorian: there’s a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, mysterious carnival girls, slow-poisoners and a rich uncle’s will. Oh, and murder . . . or rather, three murders.
“The Notting Hill Mystery,” published with illustrations by George Du Maurier (the grandfather of Daphne), was extraordinarily innovative. It is presented as Henderson’s own findings — diary entries, family letters, depositions of servant girls, even a chemical analyst’s report. Its crime-scene map and reproduced “evidence” were ideas that wouldn’t gain currency again until the 1920s. The book is both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it. Symons, writing in 1975, admitted it “quite bowled me over.”
Victorian reviewers felt the same way. The Guardian found it “very ingeniously put together,” and The Evening Herald hailed its genius, declaring, “The book in its own line stands alone.” The one mixed appraisal shows a reviewer grappling for the first time with just what a detective novel is. “The Notting Hill Mystery,” according to The London Review, was “a carefully prepared chaos, in which the reader, as in the game called solitaire, is compelled to pick out his own way to the elucidation of the proposed puzzle.”
Charles Felix quickly issued a Christmas gift book called “Barefooted Birdie” and the unremarkable novel “Velvet Lawn.” Another novel appeared so briefly that the British Library now holds one of only four known copies. And with that, the inventor of the detective novel vanished like the killer in a locked-room mystery.
Until now.
After months of investigating with the dogged tenacity of Ralph Henderson pursuing Baron R**, I was no closer than Symons in discovering the solution. Even an 1868 “Handbook of Fictitious Names” didn’t help: Felix is listed, but next to his pseudonym is nothing but a mockingly empty pair of brackets. More mysteriously, correspondence with the man is entirely missing from the archive of Saunders, Otley & Company, his book publisher.
Every detective tale needs a red herring, and I had mine: What if I pursued the author of “Velvet Lawn” instead? I found that just one other work, an earlier and unpublished one, shared the same title. It was written by . . . Benjamin Disraeli.
The novelist and prime minister was an intriguing suspect: authors are loath to leave good titles unused, and Saunders, Otley published some of Disraeli’s books. His political career also gave him good reason for a pseudonym. Yet the mystery’s style didn’t match his, and it’s unmentioned in his copious correspondence. I had a motive, but no smoking gun or fingerprints: Disraeli wasn’t my man.
I’d almost given up when I stumbled upon a Literary Gossip column in The Manchester Times for May 14, 1864. The sole identification of Charles Felix had lain there for 146 years, hidden in this single sentence: “It is understood that ‘Velvet Lawn,’ by Charles Felix, the new novel announced by Messrs. Saunders, Otley & Co., is by Mr. Charles Warren Adams, now the sole representative of that firm.”
The author was hiding in plain sight: There was no publisher correspondence with Charles Felix because he didn’t need to write to himself.
A traveler and journalist once best known for a fractious elopement with a relative of Samuel Coleridge, the publisher Charles Warren Adams (1833–1903) bears other hints of his authorship. There’s his law school training, which underlies the novel’s evidentiary process, and a previous book on parlor games — The London Review’s puzzle comparison struck closer than its reviewer realized.
Adams was also notably religious, which points to an unexpected characteristic of the first detective novel: it’s profoundly moral. It asks not just how evil exists, but what is to be done about it. Detective novels, like sermons, can offer gratifyingly simple answers to those questions, or thoughtful and troubling ones. In some the miscreant is identified and hauled off in cuffs, perhaps after a final demonic rant: Bah! And it could have worked. . . .
Adams offers no such comfort. “The Notting Hill Mystery” ends not in triumph, but in anguish. Its solution is ingenious and utterly mad, leaving its investigator to wonder, pondering the evidence: “Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidences, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate?” We never get an answer.
Adams himself had little more closure: Saunders, Otley soon went bust, and after a desultory series of projects he became the editor for an antivivisection society. He died in 1903 without ever taking credit for the immensely popular genre he had pioneered.
“The Notting Hill Mystery” has languished in obscurity ever since, but thanks to the British Library’s new program to digitize 19th-century novels for print on demand, it’s once again available in an exact copy of its original edition.
We may never know whether the Baron R** did it. But as for the identity of the first detective novelist, the case may finally be closed.
Paul Collins is the author of “The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars,” to be published in June.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Collins-t.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www
The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix: review
Jake Kerridge applauds the real first detective novel: The Notting HIll Mystery by Charles Felix.
By Jake Kerridge, Crime Fiction Critic3:59PM GMT 09 Mar 2012
Comment
Some trace the origins of the modern detective story to Oedipus Rex or the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Book of Daniel. Others point to Poe’s short stories about Auguste Dupin, or the Inspector Bucket scenes in Bleak House. But the crime novel as we know it today is normally said to have begun with Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868).
Like an older brother locked up in the attic so he cannot inherit his rightful title and fortune, “the first modern English detective novel” has actually been mouldering away forgotten for years. The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix was first published as a serial in Once a Weekmagazine in 1862-3, and in book form in 1865.
The novelist Julian Symons ferreted out a copy from the depths of the British Museum in the Seventies and declared in his magisterial history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, that it was unquestionably the first detective novel. But it was not readily available to read in this country until last year, when the British Library included it in a batch of forgotten Victorian novels made available as print-on-demand titles. The Notting Hill Mysterywas the star seller, and so it is now republished in a new edition, with the original illustrations by George du Maurier.
The book’s premise is irresistible. A woman dies after apparently sleepwalking into her husband’s laboratory and drinking from a bottle of acid. An insurance company investigator discovers that the husband had taken out no fewer than five life insurance policies on his wife. As in Columbo, we know the identity of the villain, but we must work out how the investigator will prove his case.
All the paraphernalia of the 20th-century detective novel is anticipated here: maps, marriage certificates, torn bits of letter, witness statements. Told in the form of a report by the investigator, it is as much dossier as novel. As the American academic Paul Collins has written, “the book is both utterly of its time and utterly ahead of it”.
It is Professor Collins who has recently unravelled a mystery even knottier than Felix’s plot: who exactly Felix was. Symons could find out nothing about him, and none of his correspondence was in the archive of his publishers, Saunders, Otley & Co.
It would be fun to reveal that Collins solved the mystery by deciphering an anagram in Chapter 12 or wresting the author's identity from a society of Wilkie Collins fanatics determined to suppress the secret. But as with most detective work in real life, the solution came through sheer dogged plod. Collins scoured newspaper archives until he came upon a literary gossip column in the Manchester Times of May 1864 that proclaimed Charles Felix to be one Charles Warren Adams. That explains the dearth of correspondence: Adams was the proprietor of Saunders, Otley & Co.
There is no evidence that Wilkie Collins read The Notting Hill Mysteryand I prefer to think that, just as Darwin and Mendel were devising complementary theories around this time while being ignorant of each other’s work, so Collins and Adams independently hit on this formula that still renders readers powerless to resist 150 years later.
Obscurity is often the artistic pioneer’s fate, but maybe Charles Felix’s time has come. And perhaps Wilkie Collins’s stranglehold on crime novels and TV series could be relaxed a little: when you think of all those maverick cops descended from The Moonstone’s Sergeant Cuff, wouldn’t it be nice to have a few more ITV dramas about mild-mannered insurance men?
The Notting Hill Mystery
by Charles Felix
312PP, British Library t £7.49 (PLUS 99p p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £8.99)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9131411/The-Notting-Hill-Mystery-by-Charles-Felix-review.html