For the Defence
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- English-fiction readers who enjoy courtroom, defence, and suspense themes
- Literature enthusiasts curious about the shape of early English popular fiction
- Learners who need a public-domain English text for reading practice
- Casual readers who prefer fast-paced plots and reading in short sessions
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting serious literary depth and complex narrative experimentation
- Practitioners who require rigorous accuracy in legal procedure
- Beginners unaccustomed to late nineteenth-century English usage
Reading tips
- Read a few chapters first to get a feel for the narrative pace, then decide whether to read it straight through.
- Pay attention to how dialogue advances the case; simple notes on character relationships can help.
- If using it for language study, choose dialogue-heavy chapters for close reading and note useful expressions.
- After finishing, compare it with similar courtroom-themed works to see how suspense is constructed differently.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was a British novelist. Born in England, he moved with his family to New Zealand as a child, studied at the University of Otago and qualified as a lawyer. In 1885 he went to Melbourne, and the following year he published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab at his own expense, achieving instant fame; the book is regarded as a bestselling classic in the history of detective fiction. In 1888 Hume returned to England to settle, and thereafter devoted himself to detective and suspense fiction, producing more than a hundred works in his lifetime, of which 66 are held in this collection, including The Silent House, The Gentleman Who Vanished and The Spider. He died in Essex in 1932.
