The Mysteries of Paris Complete Set.

SUE, Eugene.

Item Number: 3820

London: : Chapman and Hall, 1845.

Three quarters dark leather over marbled boards, gilt titles and tooling to the spine. Marbled edges, marbled endpapers. From the library of noted book collector E. Hubert Litchfield, with his bookplate in each volume and his small signature on the first blank endpaper. Illustrated throughout. A very attractive set.

Numerous novels inspired by The Mysteries of Paris were published all over the Western world, creating the City mysteries genre that explored the "mysteries and miseries" of cities. Works in the genre include Les Mystères de Marseille by Émile Zola, The Mysteries of London by George W. M. Reynolds, Les Mystères de Londres by Paul Féval, Les Mystères de Lyon by Jean de La Hire, I misteri di Napoli by Francesco Mastriani, the Mystères de Munich, Les Nouveaux Mystères de Paris (featuring Nestor Burma) by Léo Malet. In America, cheap pamphlet and serial fiction exposed the "mysteries and miseries" of New York, Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco and even small towns such as Lowell and Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Ned Buntline wrote The Mysteries and Miseries of New York in 1848, but the leading American writer in the genre was George Lippard whose best seller was The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall: a Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime (1844); he went on to found the paper The Quaker City as a vehicle for more of his mysteries and miseries. In 1988, Michael Chabon paid tribute to the genre with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.