The Mystery of the Sintra Road. Letters to the Diário de Notícias

Queirós, Eça de, 1845-1900Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
400K words
Chapters
41

Tags

Foreign Language Books Mystery and Suspense Mystery InvestigationScandal and RumorCriminal PsychologyEpistolary FormNews WritingReal CasesPortuguese Literature

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.O Mysterio da Estrada de Cintra. Cartas ao Diário de Noticias by Ortigão et al.Author: Queirós, Eça de, 1845-1900,Language: Portuguese, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Feb 12, 2007

Editor's review

The Mystery of the Sintra Road is a detective-style narrative by Eça de Queirós, Ortigão, and others, serialized in the form of letters to the Diário de Notícias. Centered on a strange incident on the Sintra road, it combines a criminal puzzle with the color of a 19th-century Portuguese social panorama. Framed as "letters to the newspaper," the work has a narrator who continually speculates, argues, and revises, inviting readers to join the deduction while also showing how serialized newspaper literature of the time created suspense and stirred public discussion. This Project Gutenberg edition is a public-domain Portuguese-language ebook, suitable as a free text for enthusiasts of Portuguese literature and historians of detective fiction. While reading, note the multiple perspectives and unreliable narration produced by the epistolary form, and how Queirós's satirical tone unfolds within the suspenseful narrative.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. First learn the publication context of the serialized letters, then read the main text; the narrator's argumentative tone becomes easier to follow
  2. Read the letters in order and note each new clue and conjecture, building your own chain of deduction
  3. Pay attention to disagreements and self-corrections among the narrators, and consider how the author uses unreliable narration to create suspense
  4. Consult materials on Sintra's geography and 19th-century Portuguese society to aid understanding

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

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

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41

FAQ

Is this work a novel or a collection of letters? It was serialized as letters to the Diário de Notícias, blending fictional narrative with the real newspaper frame; it can be regarded as epistolary detective narrative rather than a traditional single-plot novel.
Why are multiple authors credited? Sources show that Eça de Queirós, Ortigão, and others took part, reflecting collaborative writing in newspaper serialization; while reading, note the alternation of styles and perspectives.
Can I read it without knowing Portuguese? This edition is in the original Portuguese, with no Chinese parallel text or annotations; readers who cannot read Portuguese should first look for a translation, or they will find the text hard to enter.
Is it suitable for studying the history of detective fiction? Yes. The work advances its puzzle through newspaper serialization and epistolary conjecture, reflecting an early form of late-19th-century detective narrative in the newspaper context, and can be read as material for the history of the genre.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Queirós, Eça de, 1845-1900 Author

José Maria de Eça de Queirós (Queirós, Eça de, 1845–1900) was a Portuguese novelist, and thirteen of his works are held in this collection. Public information is limited, and details such as his exact birth and death dates and nationality could not be confirmed. Judging from his representative works, he was skilled at building narratives against a backdrop of social customs: Os Maias is subtitled "episodes of romantic life," O Primo Bazilio is labeled a "domestic episode," and O crime do padre Amaro is described as "scenes of devout life," showing his preference for examining private emotions and family ethics within concrete social settings. His writing combines irony with realism, often using his characters' fates to reveal tensions between city and countryside and between faith and desire; A Cidade e as Serras, A Illustre Casa de Ramires, and the story collection Contos reflect similar concerns. His works have had a lasting influence on Portuguese realist literature.