"Here is a written description of the persons of this gang of blacklegs, swindlers, and forgers," continued the commissioner, summing up his instructions. "It will be your object to discover their private haunts, and secure legal evidence of their nefarious practices."

Originally published in CHAMBERS'S EDINBURGH JOURNAL, the thirteen stories of the First Series (plus an eight additional episodes gathered three years later in the Second Series) mark the first appearance in fiction of a Scotland Yard detective. Russell, in the persona of "Waters," presented his narratives as first-person recollections in line with the conventions of the mid-Victorian police memoir then enjoying great popularity, while offering to the reading public a new kind of hero: a policeman with intelligence, curiosity, and integrity.

Detective fiction has always pressed up against the porous borders of that much-derided segment of popular literature now known as "true crime": just as the latter is frequently embellished and distorted for the sake of a better story, crime and detective fiction in its earliest forms borrowed the shock of the real, insisting as a matter of genre convention that the events depicted were only lightly fictionalized, that the reader was given entrée into the "marginalized social space between 'respectable' and 'criminal'" (Saunders) occupied by the real-life police detective; that they were being told a true story by an insider. Verisimilitude was the point: "The genre was designed to take the private spaces, operations and methodologies of the police force, and publicize them for the reader, and Russell himself explained that his memoir writing was designed to present an inside view into policing for readers" (Saunders). Given the bedrock importance of this interplay between the real and the unreal at the dawn of detective fiction, it is perhaps unsurprising that Sherlock Holmes, the most famous fictional private detective of later Victorian decades, would inspire a legion of devotees to insist on his factual reality, perfectly well aware that this was not true and sublimely indifferent to it.

A handsome copy of this scarce and vital Queen's Quorum and Haycraft-Queen title — especially uncommon complete in one volume.

Read more: Saunders, 'To Pry Unnecessarily into Other Men's Secrets': Crime Writing, Private Spaces and the Mid-Victorian Police Memoir; Laurence Worms, "Mysterious Waters"; Ellery Queen, Queen's Quorum: A History of the Detective-Crime Short Story, #2.