Adams v. Coleridge and another

by Charles Warren Adams

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1886

About the author

Charles Warren Adams (1833-1903) was an English lawyer, publisher and anti-vivisectionist, now known from documentary evidence to have been the author of The Notting Hill Mystery. This is usually taken to be the first full-length detective novel in English.

Born in 1833, he was the son of children's author Charlotte Adams, and the younger half-brother of clergymen and authors William Adams and Henry Cadwallader Adams. As a lawyer, Adams was involved in the bailout of the publishing firm Saunders, Otley & Co., which published his crime novel Velvet Lawn (1864) and detective novel The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) under the pseudonym Charles Felix. He died in 1903.

Reviews

[Tom Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been searching for a copy of this book for more than a decade. Contact me at victorianga@aol.com
The personal and legal disputes between Charles Warren Adams and Lord Coleridge are the subject of my book: A Shattered Idol: The Lord Chief Justice & His Troublesome Women, published in May 2025 by Marble Hill Publishers in London.

Of course, I've read The Notting Hill Mystery by Adams. Unfortunately for him, the only attention he got for this book was posthumous.

That was because he was a most difficult man. My interest in the man has more to do with his second marriage to the "spinster" daughter of the Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales, John Duke Coleridge. Relying on the Coleridge papers, my book details - what the newspapers of the day called - the most despicable scandal ever enacted in an English household.