Now Open in our Second Floor Gallery: Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction

From the Collection of Jeffrey Johnson
November 30, 2023 – February 10, 2024

Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction features selections from Grolier Club member Jeffrey Johnson’s more than 400-piece collection of detective novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibition highlights more than 90 early examples of the sources, heavily fictionalized memoirs, and first appearances of now beloved fictional detectives in the works of Francois Vidocq, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anna Katherine Green, A. Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Highlights include a four-volume set of the Newgate Calendar (1824), a sensationalist publication detailing criminal activity; the first American edition of The Memoirs of Francois Vidocq (1834), the world’s “first” detective; the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (1892); Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (1856), a mass-market “yellowback;” Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in “parts” as originally issued in 1870; Agatha Christie’s first novel (1920), with the first appearance of Hercule Poirot; and detective novels of those not normally associated with the genre such as Eden Phillpotts, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, and Gypsy Rose Lee.

The Grolier Club is free and open to the public Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Or visit the exhibition online.