Most of Allen's crime fiction does not fit the mold of the classical whodunit. Howard Haycraft has called him one of the "borderliners," an author whose work "falls somewhere between the undoubted detective story and such related forms as mystery, criminal adventure or intrigue." Allen's fiction reflects the eclecticism of his tastes and experience and is often as difficult to categorize as the man himself.
In his lifetime Allen was best known as a popularizer of science, though he was praised by Charles Darwin, A. R. Wallace, and Herbert Spencer for his original contributions to science. From 1877 until his death at age fifty-one in 1899 Allen published books and articles on an astonishing range of subjects, from biology and botany to physics, philosophy, geography, history, and art. Allen started writing fiction only after discovering that he could not make a living from his scientific writing. In the last fifteen years of his life he turned out more than forty novels and collections of stories, while continuing to produce volumes with titles such as Force and Energy: A Theory of Dynamics (1888) and The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897), as well as a series of historical guides to the major cities of Europe.
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