What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment
"A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”
While not 13 anymore, the desire to read almost anything and everything in order to read for fun and for experience is still around. I'm currently working on my PhD in a physical science, but I love to read and books are one of my non-science hobbies.
This anthology collects short stories and an excerpt from a novel, all detective fiction in the late Victorian era that all feature female detectives. These characters investigate locked room mysteries, thefts, and other now standard devices in modern detective fiction. What I found especially impressive was that these stories are all very forward looking. These detectives, in addition to being women, use forensic science to analyze fingerprints and, in one case, "fluff" on a murder victim. With the forward looking science and methods of investigation, there are also a couple instances where the attitudes of the time period in which these were written (the average of the years is about 1895) is obviously apparent. In one case, the reporter side-kick of the detective recommended that she just needed a good cry (as advice from one professional woman to another). Overall, the detective story is emerging with a new type of investigator in this collection which makes a fun read as well as an interesting insight into the evolution of the detective story.
