Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a popular and successful Victorian novelist, mounted an audacious challenge to the codes of literary propriety. A major force in the development of the modern crime novel, she turned conventional morality on its head by describing respectable murderers-aristocrats, philanthropists, professional people-who often got away with their crimes and rarely felt remorse. Perhaps more daring, many of her boldest criminals were outwardly perfect Victorian ladies who were capable of fraud, bigamy, cruelty, even murder, if it served their purposes. The lasting impact of her work, with that of her contemporaries Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, was to domesticate crime, moving it from the slums to the country house, where most English mystery writers and their readers still find it. In Henry James's words, these sensation novelists wrote of "those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors."

One sure sign of Braddon's...