Bleak House: Crime Classics

by Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.25

  The case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce - a dispute over a vast fortune left by a miser who died intestate - has occupied the Court of Chancery for years. When Lady Dedlock faints upon recognizing the handwriting in one of the documents pertaining to the case, her sinister lawyer, Tulkinghorn, immediately suspects a hidden secret - and an opportunity for blackmail...But he is playing a dangerous game, and is soon found dead: a victim of murder. It is down to Detective Inspector Bucket to solve the mystery. Dickens was fascinated by the sensational crime cases of his day. His preoccupations - with crime and the legal system, with social injustice - are dramatically evident in Bleak House: at once a classic crime novel and a classic of world literature.

• Used

  Paperback
  1976

  $3.25

• New

  paperback
  

  $7.05

  With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience. But it is his symbolic art that projects these things in a vision that embraces black comedy, cosmic farce, and tragic ruin. In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $18.43

  The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it.