Books by Michael Ashley

The Female Detective

by Alexander McCall Smith, Andrew Forrester, Michael Ashley

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

"Literary ancestor to Miss Marple, Lisbeth Salander and Nancy Drew" --Guardian

'Miss Gladden', the first female detective, is a determined and resourceful figure, with ingenious skills of logic and deduction. Pursuing mysterious cases, she works undercover and only introduces herself as a detective when the need arises. Her personal circumstances and even her real name are never revealed. This obfuscation makes sense, considering that when The Female Detective was first published in 1864 there were no official female detectives in Britain--in fact, there were no women police officers either (and would not be for another 50 years). And the novel itself was well ahead of its time; further stories and novels featuring women detectives would not be widely published until the turn of the century.

From the Depths And Other Strange Tales of the Sea

by Mike Ashley, Michael Ashley

From atop the choppy waves to the choking darkness of the abyss, the seas are full of mystery and rife with tales of inexplicable events and encounters with the unknown.

In this anthology we see a thrilling spread of narratives: sailors are pitched against a nightmare from the depth, invisible to the naked eye; a German U-boat commander is tormented by an impossible transmission via Morse Code; a ship ensnares itself in the kelp of the Sargasso Sea and dooms a crew of mutineers, seemingly out of revenge for her lost captain.

The supernatural is set alongside the grim affairs of sailors scorned in these salt-soaked tales, recovered from obscurity for the 21st century.

Queens of the Abyss Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird

by Mike Ashley, Michael Ashley

It is too often accepted that during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the male writers who developed and pushed the boundaries of the weird tale, with women writers following in their wake--but this is far from the truth. This new anthology follows the instrumental contributions made by women writers to the weird tale, and revives the lost authors of the early pulp magazines along with the often overlooked work of more familiar authors. See the darker side of The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett and the sensitively-drawn nightmares of Marie Corelli and Violet Quirk. Hear the captivating voices of Weird Tales magazine contributors Sophie Wenzel Ellis, Greye La Spina, and Margaret St Clair, and bow down to the sensational, surreal, and challenging writers who broke down the barriers of the day. Featuring material never before republished, from the abyssal depths of the British Library vaults.