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This historical novel is the third and final book in American poet and fiction writer Janet Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence series, based on legal case studies compiled in the nineteenth century. In The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron , Lewis returns to her beloved France, the setting of The Wife of Martin Guerre , her best-known novel and the first in the series. As Swallow Press executive editor Kevin Haworth relates in a new introduction, Monsieur Scarron shifts the reader into the center of Paris in 1694, during the turbulent reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. The junction of this time and place gives Monsieur Scarron an intriguing political element not apparent in either The Wife of Martin Guerre or The Trial of Sören Qvist . The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron begins in a small bookbinder’s shop on a modest Paris street, but inexorably expands to encompass a tumultuous affair, growing social unrest, and the conflicts between a legal system based on oppressive order and a society about to undergo harsh changes. With its domestic drama set against a larger political and historical backdrop, Monsieur Scarron is considered by some critics and readers to be the most intricately layered and fully realized book of Lewis’s long career. Originally published in 1959, Monsieur Scarron has remained in print almost continuously ever since.

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Good-bye, Son and Other Stories, Janet Lewis’s only collection of short fiction, was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death. A mother’s encounters with her deceased son, an aging woman sitting with the new knowledge of her troubled older sister’s death, and a teenager disillusioned by her own mortality are among the characters, mostly women and girls, whom Lewis delivers. Her understated style and knack for unadorned observation embed us with them as they reckon with the disquieting forces—incomprehensible and destructive to some, enlightening to others—that move us from birth, through life, to death. In the process, Lewis has crafted a paean to the living.

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Originally published in 1947, The Trial of Sören Qvist has been praised by a number of critics for its intriguing plot and Janet Lewis’s powerful writing. And in the introduction to this new edition, Swallow Press executive editor and author Kevin Haworth calls attention to the contemporary feeling of the story—despite its having been written more than fifty years ago and set several hundred years in the past. As in Lewis’s best-known novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre , the plot derives from Samuel March Phillips’s nineteenth-century study, Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, in which this British legal historian considered the trial of Pastor Sören Qvist to be the most striking case.

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In this new edition of Janet Lewis’s classic short novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre , Swallow Press executive editor Kevin Haworth writes that Lewis’s story is “a short novel of astonishing depth and resonance, a sharply drawn historical tale that asks contemporary questions about identity and belonging, about men and women, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.” Originally published in 1941, The Wife of Martin Guerre has earned the respect and admiration of critics and readers for over sixty years. Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, this story of Bertrande de Rols is the first of three novels making up Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence suite (the other two are The Trial of Sören Qvist and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron ). Swallow Press is delighted and honored to offer readers beautiful new editions of all three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence novels, each featuring a new introduction by Kevin Haworth.

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This is the first digital version of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a collection of three historical novels by noted American writer Janet Lewis. For the first time, these works have been brought together in a single edition, each with a new introduction by Kevin Haworth: The Wife of Martin Guerre Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, The Wife of Martin Guerre follows Bertrande de Rois and her lost-and-returned husband through a tale of impersonation, conspiracy, and small-town intrigue. Their fascinating story has also inspired a bestselling historical study and two films, including The Return of Martin Guerre. The Trial of Sören Qvist Although set in seventeenth-century Denmark, The Trial of Sören Qvist has a contemporary feel and has been praised for its intriguing plot and for Lewis’s powerful writing. In this second novel in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, Lewis recounts the story of a murder, an investigation, and a pious town pastor who confesses to the crime, driven perhaps more by a recognition of his own moral flaws than by guilt for the acts of which he stood accused. The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron The court of Louis XIV and a modest Paris street provide the incongruous settings for this tale of a humble bookbinder, his wife, and the young craftsman who seduces her and blackmails her husband into covering up a terrible crime. This third and last case of circumstantial evidence bristles with character, the smell of blood, and considerable suspense against a backdrop of national political unrest in the cruel and dingy Paris of the seventeenth century.

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