Foreword: Urban Crime Short Stories

Growing up in the Virginia countryside, we’d all heard of the danger lurking at the other end of the highway. There was a city out there. The few people who’d survived a visit returned with tales of suffocating crowds, rampant crime, drive-by shootings, pickpockets, and other unmentionable terrors. And they all swore they’d never return. I imagined a midnight world where a tourist would be shot dead the second he stepped off the bus. The thought thrilled me. I could not stay away.

This must be what the Victorians felt as populations shifted from farms and villages to the booming cities. During the decades following the Industrial Revolution, the metropolis came to symbolize crime, pollution, disease, and strange foreign immigrants. Cholera, yellow fever, and tuberculosis swept through cramped tenements, leaving horrific death in their wakes. Those who endured the disease, the toxic gas lighting, and the filthy air just might fall victim to thieves, swindlers, or serial killers like Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes.

With their fingers always testing the pulse of their times, it seems inevitable that writers would find boundless inspiration in such an environment and its residents. Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator encounters ‘the type and the genius of deep crime’ among the teeming masses of London in his tale ‘The Man of the Crowd.’ In ‘The Traveler’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed,’ Wilkie Collins describes the dangers that await a young visitor to a city populated with thieves conspiring to kill and rob him. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment shows just how easily such a visitor can become a murderer. A similar theme is explored in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime,’ in which the title character is also compelled to kill.

Other authors romanticize the urban criminal, as do E.W. Hornung in his stories of the master criminal Raffles and Maurice Leblanc in his narratives of Arsène Lupin. Master criminals and gangs terrorize entire cities in works like Edgar Wallace’s When the Gangs Came to London and Jack London’s ‘Winged Blackmail.’

Just when it seems the thugs and criminals have won the day, the master detective, in the form of Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, arrives to expose their nefarious schemes in order to bring them to justice. As the twentieth century city gives birth to new dangers so too arrives another generation of fictional detectives from Melville Davisson Post, Baroness Orczy, and others. In the twenty-first century, the city is larger, darker, and more violent; and its criminals have previously unforeseen weapons and technology. In other words, today’s crime writer has more inspiration than ever.

As you read the following stories, which trace the evolution of urban crime fiction from the nineteenth century until today, you just might experience something of the thrill their authors found in the cities they knew. Then you won’t be able to stay away.

Christopher P. Semtner

Curator

Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond, Virginia