This is the first DLB volume of a planned series on British mystery writers. Because there has been little scholarship devoted to individual mystery writers except for the most prominent, this volume is particularly useful as a stimulus to further study. Mystery fiction arose in Britain when the middle 19th-century phenomenon of middle-culture literary art blurred the distinction between serious literature and popular fiction. With prose fiction, and particularly the novel, fixed as the primary literary vehicle of the 19th and 20th centuries, the mystery novel in its various guises has claimed a prominent position in mainstream literary art.

35 entries include: Grant Allen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Buchan, G.K. Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Angus Reach, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells.