1880s · Crime in the Gilded Age
Gilded Age
Detective Stories
The Gilded Age Detective Stories include compelling novels by Albert W. Aiken, and many will feature stories set in the theater. Aiken’s own experience as a playwright and actor bring authenticity to these thrilling tales of mystery and detection!
Begin on the Barbary Coast…
The Frisco Detective
San Francisco, California, 1873:
Andrew De Lormé is a young attorney with more education than wealth, and he interrupts his Bohemian way of life to become involved with La Belle Helene, an alluring stage actress.
A British gentleman arrives in San Francisco to fulfill his dead brother’s legacy by finding his brother’s long lost child. This child would now be an adult in their twenties and if they can be found, the gentleman will award them an inheritance of Five Millions of Dollars. Of course, several parties are all too ready to help!
Soon the young DeLorme is also deeply involved in searching for the missing heir through the seamiest parts of San Francisco, and the Flats of the Stanislaus where gold was still being mined.
Andrew De Lormé meets challenges with fists and firearms, but no one is prepared for the results of his search!
San Francisco First in series Stand-alone novel
$14.99Trade Paperback$3.99Kindle eBook
The Actress Detective/Hilda Serene Trilogy
These Albert Aiken novels are great examples of his detective and crime writing. An unusual central character sets the The Hilda Serene Trilogy apart from other popular stories of the day. Hilda Serene was the Actress Detective, and she grew up in tough Western mining camps, educated by both learned men and violent brawlers. Hilda could fight like a man, shoot skillfully, and became an actress to get out into the world and away from the camps. Landing broke in New York with a failed production, she gets a break from a friend and joins a major production.
All good pulp fare for the time, but this trilogy has a subtext that may be unique for 1889 when the first two novels were published. Hilda Serene considered herself to be a “mistake of nature” who should have been born a man. The arc of this subtext in the trilogy takes Hilda from a practicing lesbian to essentially a trans-man (a term that would not be used for more than forty years after these stories were created).
Albert Aiken had a parallel career in the theater as a playwright and actor, an environment that included people who lived alternative lifestyles. Still, it is very unusual that he would write these three stories 1889 and 1990.
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The Actress Detective
Hilda Serene grew up in tough Western mining camps, educated by both learned men and violent brawlers. Hilda could fight like a man, shoot skillfully, and became an actress to get away from the camps. Broke in New York, she got a break and joined a major production. Soon her skills as a fighter helped thwart an attempted murder and begin a new career as a detective..
Kindle eBook $3.99
COMING SOON!
The Silver Sharp
A banker’s murder in New York, discovered in part by NYPD detective “H. Serene,” quickly leads to a chase out to the Wyoming Territory. Hilda Serene, disguised as a gambler known as The Silver Sharp, locates the suspect in a small cattle town — where she survives with fists and firearms.
Kindle eBook $3.99
Tom of California
The Actress Detective goes undercover as a man to catch elusive criminals in the beach resorts of New Jersey. A young woman’s fortune is saved, justice is served, and the gang is broken up by someone the criminals know as “Tom” of California (actually the Actress Detective).
Kindle eBook $3.99
Editor’s note · Dark Lantern Tales
Why I picked these stand-alones.
The Gilded Age was the great laboratory of American detective fiction. Long before the codified mystery, before the locked rooms and the country-house puzzles, writers in the 1880s were already inventing the disguised investigator, the consulting detective, the woman who could outshoot any man at the rail. These four novels are some of my favorites from that period.
They are not connected by a single hero or a single city. The thread is the era and the mood — gas-lamps, opium dens, masked balls, the cattle camps of the Wyoming Territory, the foggy waterfront of San Francisco. The detectives are inventive and a little reckless. The villains are vivid. The pace is fast.
Each is independent — you can read them in any order. Volume 1, the Frisco Detective, is the only one currently in trade paperback; the others are Kindle eBooks. Read whichever cover pulls you in first.
Mark Williams · Editor & Publisher
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Eleven Volumes · 1878–1894
The Joe Phenix Detective Series
Albert W. Aiken’s long-running NYC detective — the series that out-published Sherlock Holmes by a decade.
Industrial Thrillers · 1884–1897
Steam-Age Crime Stories
Daring Desmond and Gideon Gault — two novels in one paperback. The colder, harder edge of the catalog.