While reading The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, I read some detective novels from the present. Through Novelist, a novels-by-subject finder "the maltese falcom" brings up a novel by Joanne Dobson called The Maltese Manuscript. I read this detective novel and found that its series informs readers about women writers in the Nineteenth Century.

Within Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth Century America,, by Joanne Dobson, is an Emily Dickinson quote from a letter in which Dickinson comments about "newspaper reporting of industrial calamities". The comments are from Dobson:

Who writes those funny accidents, where railroads meet each other unexpectedly, and gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally? The author, too, relates them in such a sprightly way, that they are quite attractive.

Here the message pulls away from the subject matter; violence and personal calamity in a newly industrialized society are subordinate to matters of literary style, causing a fracture of expectation upon which the success of the passage, as a piece of writing, depends Through felicitous combinations, words are wrenched away from their meanings: accidents are "funny"…

(Perhaps this Dickinson observation about language led Joanne Dobson to write her series of detective novels to enlarge knowledge about women writers in history. )