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The period from the early 1880s through the First World War has been called "The Golden Age of the Storytellers." These were the writers who sought not to write great literature, but to entertain, spinning yarns to be printed and read, just as their predecessors, the minstrels and bards, recited and were listened to. Through their countless tales of adventure and derring-do they brought romance and colour to the lives of those who could do no more than dream. This was the age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells. Canadian writers contributed in no small way to the cornucopia of romance and adventure the reading public could find at the newsstands and bookstores. This is the period of which Messrs Roper, Beharriell, and Scheider in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (2d ed., 1976) say "the Canadian fiction-writers between 1880 and 1920 were read more widely by their contemporaries, inside and outside Canada, than have been the Canadian fiction-writers - collectively - since." Literary historian David Skene-Melvin, the leading authority on Canadian criminous literature, has garnered from amongst the collections and magazines of the period a second anthology of stirring tales by Grant Allen, Robert Barr, Algernon Blackwood, W. H. Blake, Susan Carleton, William Henry Drummond, William Fraser, Harvey O'Higgins, Sir Gilbert Parker, Hesketh Pearson, Alan Sullivan, and others, some never before anthologized, guaranteed to set the blood a-racing and stimulate the imagination.

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold;The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold."

Robert W. Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." The High Arctic has long been a land of romance, a magnet drawing adventurers. From the 60th Parallel to the North Pole across the tundra and the Barren Lands, the Far North has beckoned the brave, the foolhardy, and the curious. The mystery of the Land of the Midnight Sun has fascinated poets and writers, painters and sculptors, no less than scientists and explorers. In this anthology, a spectrum of Canadian writers explore in their imaginations crime and malfeasance and thrilling danger under the flickering Northern Lights. Come mushing down these secret trails with John Ballem, John Buchan, Rose De Shaw, Carol Newhouse, Marjorie Pickthall, James Powell, Peter Sellers, Robert W. Service, and Eric Wright, as they probe the wilderness of human evil in this entertaining melange of short stories old and new. From the paleolithic to high-tech oil drilling, the enduring saga of crime and punishment is told by these talented story-spinners in these tales of detection, mystery, and adventure.

Although it may lack the labyrinthine sewers of Paris, the mean streets of Los Angeles, or the low and vile alleys of London, Toronto is not without its places of danger, excitement and romance. In Bloody York, thirteen Canadian writers from the late nineteenth century to today find intrigue, mystery and terror in the familiar streets and places of Toronto, in stories set from the 1860s to beyond the present.

Meet some fascinating females: Jennie Baxer, 1890s journalist and world traveller Nelvana of the Northern Lights, created for comic book-starved Canadians during the Second World War the 60s' Eve Adam, the "Rock Hit of Prague," whose methods violate all the "rules" for detective books and, very much of the 1990s, vampire detective Vicki Nelson, whose beat is Toronto's Queen Street West

As well as the fifteen investigating women in the book, Skene-Melvin's introduction describes hundreds of female sleuths and their creators in an in-depth analysis of women detective fiction by Canadians.

You will recognize many of the writers included in "Investigating Women" Grant Allen, Robert Barr, Marisa De Franceschi, Adrian Dingle, Katherine V. Forrest, Hulbert Footner, Maurice Gagnon, Margaret Haffner, Joan Hall Hovey, Tanya Huff, Medora Sale, Josef Skvorecky, and Betsy Struthers.

For each of the selections a brief note sets the story; bibliographies help readers find other books by the authors featured in "Investigating Women."