Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories is the 1891 short story collection by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The title story is a comic inversion of the murder mystery: a cheiromantist reads in Lord Arthur’s palm that he is destined to commit a murder, and the conscientious young aristocrat decides he must get the crime done before his wedding, with farcical results. The collection also contains The Canterville Ghost, Wilde’s much-loved comedy of an American family unimpressed by the resident ghost of an English country house, along with The Sphinx Without a Secret and The Model Millionaire. The stories show Wilde’s comic gifts in narrative form in the years just before his great stage comedies. The Canterville Ghost in particular has been adapted continually for film and television. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.