The Red Window cover

The Red Window

Rating 2.8
Word count
458K words
Chapters
46

Tags

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. The Red Window by Fergus Hume. Author: Hume, Fergus, 1859-1932. Language: English. Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature. Release Date: Feb 9, 2013

Editor's review

The Red Window is a full-length detective novel by Fergus Hume, an Australian-born British writer, digitized by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain ebook. Hume was known for popular fiction with intricate plots and dense suspense, and this book continues his knack for mystery narrative: a red window leads to hidden events, relationships unfold layer by layer, and readers are drawn on by a steady stream of doubts. It is better read as a sample of English popular detective fiction from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century than as serious reading in pursuit of literary depth. The Gutenberg text is complete, free, and easy to obtain, suitable for reading in installments on commutes or trips, and also usable as selected classroom reading for genre fiction courses. While reading, pay attention to how the author plants clues, controls pace, and uses dialogue to advance the plot; if reading the original English, first grasp the main line, then go back over the details.

Who it's for

A good fit for

  • Genre readers who enjoy classic detective fiction and the puzzle-solving process
  • Literature fans who want to understand early English popular detective fiction
  • Teachers who need public-domain English novels for classroom reading
  • Self-learners with English reading habits looking for light full-length reading

Not a good fit for

  • Readers who prefer tight modern crime fiction and lack patience for slow-burn narratives
  • English beginners who need a Chinese translation or detailed annotations
  • Readers expecting serious literary analysis and deep character portrayal

Reading tips

  1. Read the first few chapters to clarify the relationships, then move chapter by chapter without repeatedly going back to verify.
  2. Keep a running note of doubts and clues as they appear, and after finishing look back at how the author ties them together.
  3. If English reading is difficult, read a plot summary first and then the original to lower the threshold.
  4. After finishing, compare with other detective fiction of the same period, comparing narrative pace and puzzle design.

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
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46

FAQ

Is this a complete full-length novel?
Yes. Project Gutenberg provides the complete English text of The Red Window as a public-domain ebook, unabridged, though it usually contains no modern introduction or notes.
Is it suitable for English beginners?
Not very. The novel is in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century English, and its sentence patterns and vocabulary are difficult for beginners; it is best attempted after gaining some foundation in English reading.
Is it similar to the Sherlock Holmes series?
It belongs to the same English detective fiction tradition, but Hume's work leans more toward melodramatic suspense, and its rigor of deduction and approach to characterization differ from the Sherlock Holmes series; it can be read for genre comparison.

Comments

Find this book

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

Fergus Hume (Fergusson Wright Hume) Author · English · 1859–1932

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.

More by the same author

Top rated in the same category