This volume explores the novels and short stories of the popular author Richard Marsh through a range of critical lenses. An exemplary figure of the New Grub Street, Marsh was an important presence within fin-de-siècle literary culture, whose middlebrow genre fiction simultaneously reinforces and challenges the dominant discourses of the period.

1 Introduction – Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna VuohelainenPart I: Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime2 Tall tales and true: Richard Marsh and late-Victorian journalism – Nick Freeman3 Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender – Johan Höglund4 ‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories – Minna VuohelainenPart II: Richard Marsh, masculinity and money5 Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller: The Datchet Diamonds – Victoria Margree6 ‘The crowd would have it that I was a hero’: populism, New Humour and the male clerk in Marsh’s Sam Briggs adventures – Mackenzie BartlettPart III: Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic7 ‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt – Ailise Bulfin8 Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess – Neil HultgrenPart IV: Richard Marsh and object relations9 ‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself’: ‘transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Richard Marsh – Graeme Pedlingham10 Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death – Daniel Orrells11 ‘Something on which you may exercise your ingenuity’: diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Richard Marsh – Jessica AllsopIndex

This collection of essays questions our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh (1857–1915), one of the most prolific and popular authors of the period, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula for several decades. Born Richard Bernard Heldmann, he began his literary career penning boys’ stories under his real name but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. A versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time, Marsh produced middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure. His stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres with which we are familiar today. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this volume makes a significant contribution to Victorian and Edwardian literary studies by examining a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through a variety of critical lenses, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis and object relations theory, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. The essays explore how Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often providing unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.