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Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain as The Big Bow Mystery by Henry & Co. 1892
Published as The Perfect Crime by The Detective Story Club Ltd
for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929
‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’
first published by Graham’s Magazine 1841
Introductions © John Curran 2015
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2015
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008137281
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137298
Version: 2015-07-06
Contents
The Big Bow Mystery: BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Preface of Murders and Mysteries
The Murders in the Rue Morgue: BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
WHEN a corpse is found, with its throat cut and no sign of a weapon, in a room locked and bolted from the inside, both murder and suicide must be discarded as impossible. But writers of detective fiction, and their readers, are more circumspect. For them these fascinating conditions pose the questions: Whodunit? and, even more intriguingly, How?
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) was not only the first detective story, but also the first locked-room detective story; and The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the first book-length example of the form. As such, it occupies an important place in the history of detective fiction.
The
