In Northanger Abbey, Isabella Thorpe recommends seven Gothic novels to Catherine Morland:

‘Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.’

‘Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?’

‘I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.’

‘Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?’

‘Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.’

For a century it was assumed that Jane Austen had invented these titles, but then Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir discovered they were actual novels. Here’s an excerpt from Horrid Mysteries, which is certainly well named:

‘Thank God, Countess,’ one of them began, ‘that you have been rescued from the cruel hands of that barbarian, and are now in the company of more humane beings!’

‘From what cruel hands?’ I replied, with astonishment.

‘From those of your pretended lover, the Marquis Carlos of G******.’

‘Be silent, vile reptile,’ I exclaimed, ‘and dare not to asperse the name of a man whom I adore!’

Ironically, Austen’s parody may have rescued these titles from an oblivion they otherwise deserved. Announcing his discovery in a 1927 article, Sadleir wrote, “So long as Jane Austen is read — which will be for at least as long as there are readers at all — [these novels] will survive as tiny stitches in the immense tapestry of English literature.”

The shortest named speaking role in Shakespeare is that of Taurus in Antony and Cleopatra.

He says, “My lord?”

In 1928, theologian and mystery writer Ronald Knox codified 10 rules of detective fiction:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

These came to define the “golden age” of the classic murder mystery. The story, Knox wrote, “must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.”

When Hunter S. Thompson published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, writers began to send him manuscripts, hoping he could help to get them published in Rolling Stone. Thompson sent a package of their poems to the magazine’s poetry editor, Charles Perry. “I don’t know about this stuff,” he wrote. “If you feel the same way, send it back to them with this” — and he included a prepared rejection letter:

You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate shit! Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again. If I had the time, I’d come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your forehead. Why don’t you get a job, germ? Maybe delivering advertising handouts door to door, or taking tickets for a wax museum. You drab South Bend cocksuckers are all the same; like those dope-addled dingbats at the Rolling Stone office. I’d like to kill those bastards for sending me your piece … and I’d just as soon kill you, too. Jam this morbid drivel up your ass where your readership will better appreciate it.

“We actually sent it out to a couple of people, thinking they would appreciate it,” Perry recalled later. “One person took it to a lawyer and asked whether he could sue us, and the lawyer said, ‘No, you don’t have a leg to stand on … but could I Xerox it?'”

Writings of Sherlock Holmes, compiled by Vincent Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes:

• Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos
• Upon the Tracing of Footsteps
• Upon the Influence of a Trade Upon the Form of the Hand
• The Book of Life
• On the Typewriter and Its Relation to Crime
• Upon the Dating of Old Documents
• Of Tattoo Marks
• On Secret Writings
• On the Surface Anatomy of the Human Ear
• Early English Charters
• On the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus
• Chaldean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language
• Malingering
• Upon the Uses of Dogs in the Work of the Detective
• Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen
• The Blanched Soldier
• The Lion’s Mane
• Sigerson
• The Whole Art of Detection
• Translations

In June 1955, a document purporting to be Holmes’ last will and testament was published by Nathan L. Bengis in the London Mystery Magazine. In it, Holmes leaves “to the authorities of Scotland Yard, one copy of each of my trifling monographs on crime detection, unless happily they shall feel they have outgrown the need for the elementary suggestions of an amateur detective.”

Charles Dickens to London clockmaker John Bennett:

My Dear Sir — Since my hall clock was sent to your establishment to be cleaned it has gone (as indeed it always has) perfectly well, but has struck the hours with great reluctance; and, after enduring internal agonies of a most distressing nature, it has now ceased striking altogether. Though a happy release for the clock, this is not convenient to the household. If you can send down any confidential person with whom the clock can confer, I think it may have something on its works that it would be glad to make a clean breast of.

W.S. Gilbert to the Times:

Sir, — Allow me to corroborate Dean Gregory’s statement as to the degeneration that has overtaken a company [the London and Northwestern Railway] which, until recently, was justly regarded as a pattern to all other lines in the matter of punctuality and rapidity of despatch. … In the face of Saturday the officials of the company stand helpless and appalled. This day, which recurs at stated and well-ascertained intervals, is treated as a phenomenon entirely outside the ordinary operations of nature, and, as a consequence, no attempt whatever is made to grapple with its inherent difficulties. To the question, ‘What has caused the train to be so late?’ the officials reply, ‘It is Saturday’ — as who should say, ‘It is an earthquake.’

Mark Twain to a gas and electric lighting company in Hartford, Conn.:

Gentlemen, — There are but two places in our whole street where lights could be of any value, by any accident, and you have measured and appointed your intervals so ingeniously as to leave each of those places in the centre of a couple of hundred yards of solid darkness. When I noticed that you were setting one of your lights in such a way that I could almost see how to get into my gate at night, I suspected that it was a piece of carelessness on the part of the workmen, and would be corrected as soon as you should go around inspecting and find it out. My judgment was right; it is always right, when you are concerned. For fifteen years, in spite of my prayers and tears, you persistently kept a gas lamp exactly half way between my gates, so that I couldn’t find either of them after dark; and then furnished such execrable gas that I had to hang a danger signal on the lamp post to keep teams from running into it, nights. Now I suppose your present idea is, to leave us a little more in the dark.

Don’t mind us — out our way; we possess but one vote apiece, and no rights which you are in any way bound to respect. Please take your electric light and go to — but never mind, it is not for me to suggest; you will probably find the way; and any way you can reasonably count on divine assistance if you lose your bearings.

S.L. Clemens.

“Guess whose birthday it is today?” Franklin Pierce Adams asked Beatrice Kaufman.

“Yours?” she guessed.

“No, but you’re getting warm,” he said. “It’s Shakespeare’s!”