£4.99 – £9.99
A gothic tale of murder and corruption set in the world imagined by our most famous 19th century writers.
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The story of the death of Sir Martin Malprelate acquired, from its earliest telling, a phantasmagorical quality, shrouding the violence of the assault in an embellishment of diabolic spectres and uncanny mystery.
Struck down in a Camden street, the railway magnate never lived to see his dream of a line from London to Middlemarch. But who was to blame? An angry mob? Or were the witnesses who swore he was struck by a demonic train, wheels ringing on rails where no rails lay, to be believed? A hated man who many wished dead? An impossible death?
Truly a case for the father of all detectives.
Adam Roberts is Professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, London University. He is a leading authority on the works of Charles Dickens and has also published numerous books and academic studies on, amongst others, Browning, Tennyson, Wells, Walter Scott and Coleridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Vice President of the H.G. Wells Society and the author of more than 20 critically acclaimed SF novels and a number of non-fiction books on the genre. He lives to the West of London with his wife and two children.