Gaston Leroux, perhaps best known as the author of The Phantom of the Opera in its novel form, was also the author of a popular series of mystery novels featuring a young journalist cum detective named Joseph Rouletabille. It is most likely that Leroux styled his hero after himself. Rouletabille was in the tradition of other great detectives who solved their cases by pure deductive reasoning. Much as Sherlock Holmes, who eliminated the impossible and concluded that whatever remained, however improbable must be the truth, Rouletabille included the known facts about the case and eliminated everything that was not a known fact, no matter how much it appeared to relate to the case. In The Sec...

Le mystère est grand. On a essayé de tuer mademoiselle Stangerson dans une chambre fermée de l'intérieur, aucun accès visible, volets clos... Qui a voulu perpétrer ce meurtre et surtout, comment a-t-il procédé ? (Résumé par Naf Brusa)

L’intrigue se déroule sous la coupole de l’Académie française. À la suite de la mort de Mgr d’Abbeville, chaque nouveau candidat à l’immortalité qui est désigné pour occuper son fauteuil, meurt lors du discours d’hommage à son prédécesseur. Hippolyte Patard, secrétaire perpétuel commence à désespérer, personne ne voulant être le successeur de Mgr d’Abbeville, craignant une malédiction lancée par un mage, dont on n’aurait pas voulu comme académicien. C’est alors qu’arrive Gaspard Lalouette, simple antiquaire et marchand. (Wikipedia)

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont est considérée comme le premier écrivain à avoir volontairement adopté un style simple réellement adapté aux jeunes lecteurs. Bien qu’elle exprime sa méfiance envers les contes qu’elle considère « pernicieux pour les enfants », c’est surtout par ce genre qu’elle est encore lue.

C’est dans Le Magasin des enfants, publié en 1757, que figure un conte, abrégé de la première version écrite par une autre romancière, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, qui lui apportera la renommée : La Belle et la Bête.

(adapté de Wikipedia)

1862 Anna Leonowens accepted an offer made by the Siamese consul in Singapore, Tan Kim Ching, to teach the wives and children of Mongkut, king of Siam. The king wished to give his 39 wives and concubines and 82 children a modern Western education on scientific secular lines, which earlier missionaries’ wives had not provided. Leonowens sent her daughter Avis to school in England, and took her son Louis with her to Bangkok. She succeeded Dan Beach Bradley, an American missionary, as teacher to the Siamese court.

Leonowens served at court until 1867, a period of nearly six years, first as a teacher and later as language secretary for the king. Although her position carried great r...

The novel formally inverts Don Quixote: as the don mistakes himself for the knightly hero of a Romance, so Arabella mistakes herself for the maiden love of a Romance. While the don thinks it his duty to praise the platonically pure damsels he meets (such as the woman he loves), so Arabella believes it is in her power to kill with a look and it is the duty of her lovers to suffer ordeals on her behalf.

Een avonturenroman vol mysteries – met zeerovers, struikrovers, schipbreuken, moord en doodslag – afgunst, wraak en rampspoed afgewisseld door humor en liefde.

Ferdinand Huyck, de zoon van de hoofdschout in Amsterdam, keert na een jarenlange reis terug in Nederland. Onderweg ontmoet hij Henriette Blaek, die hij al snel niet meer uit zijn gedachten kan zetten. Nog voor hij Amsterdam kan bereiken wordt hij echter bij Naarden overvallen en beroofd door struikrovers. Een geheimzinnige man, die zich Bos noemt, redt hem zijn leven. Wie is die heer Bos, die zich, met zijn mooie dochter Amelia, verschuilt voor de politie? En hoe moet Ferdinand zich eruit redden als Henriette hem toevallig zi...

In the heat of the failed 1905 revolution in Russia, Lenin here contrasts the precision of the Bolshevik political program and tactics with various inconsistent and servile factions within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party.

Calhoun is an Interstellar Medical Serviceman, and he's needed on Dara. Trouble is: Dara is forbidden. Taboo. And breaking quarantine will make Calhoun a presumed plague-carrier and subject to being shot on sight by anyone from Weald. But hey! If he did the smart thing, we wouldn't have a story!
But why are men from Dara shooting at him?

Bors felt as if he'd been hit over the head. This was ridiculous! He'd planned and carried out the destruction of that warship because the information of its existence and location was verified by a magnetometer.

But, if he'd known how the information had been obtained--if he'd known it had been guessed at by a discharged spaceport employee, and a paranoid personality, and a man who used a hazel twig or something similar--if he'd known that, he'd never have dreamed of accepting it. He'd have dismissed it flatly!