An Officer and a Spy

A doctor probes the mind of Grace Marks, convicted in a notorious Canadian murder case.

In the London Library, researcher Roland Michell finds unsigned drafts of a letter from the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, traces them to the poet Christabel LaMotte, and with Maud Bailey follows a correspondence from their secret affair that the academy has never seen. A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel is Victorian time-slip historical fiction of that affair’s 1859 crisis, and of the late-1980s academics who cross London, Yorkshire, and Brittany to possess the proof.

In 1862 London, pickpocket Sue Trinder is planted as a maid in a lonely Thames-side mansion to help a gentleman swindle an heiress—then the con turns inside out. Sarah Waters’s Booker-shortlisted Victorian novel is literary historical fiction of thieves, asylums, and desire, with crime-plot machinery that still startles.

In eleventh-century Persia a judge who might punish Omar Khayyam for his verses gives him a blank book instead, and the Rubaiyat crosses the Seljuk court, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and Hassan-i Sabbah’s fortress at Alamut. Amin Maalouf’s 1988 novel (English translation) is medieval biographical historical fiction of that manuscript, taken up again in the 1890s by an American who carries it toward the Titanic.

On a moonlit London road, drawing-master Walter Hartright meets a woman dressed all in white—then, engaged at Limmeridge, he is pulled into the plot that binds Laura Fairlie to Sir Percival Glyde and the charming, dangerous Count Fosco. Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel is Victorian historical mystery of swapped identities, a private asylum, and the question of who the woman in white really is.

A yellow diamond looted from a temple at Seringapatam is given to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday in 1848 Yorkshire, and vanishes from her sitting room that night, with no one in the house above suspicion. Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel is Victorian mystery historical fiction of Sergeant Cuff’s investigation, an opium-blurred memory, and the guardians who want the Moonstone returned to its shrine.