In an autobiographical note she wrote a few years before her death, Mary Elizabeth Braddon remarked that while the English reading public was attracted by stories of crime, it was yet more fascinated by the processes of scientific detection. As she put it, ‘[There] is nothing that English men and women enjoy more than the crime which they call “a really good murder” […] Every man is at heart a Sherlock Holmes, while every woman thinks herself a criminal investigator by instinct.’ These words by Braddon confirm the opinion of many contemporary critics, who agree that sensation novels established some of the conditions for the birth of detective fiction and that their ‘preoccupation with secrets, and the revelation of those secrets and of crime, are often so intrinsic to the plot that they must be considered as the antecedents of the emergent detective novel’. Basically, sensation novels focused on familial secrets that involved female characters, who became the object of male scrutiny. In this sense, they dramatised a cluster of mid-century Victorian anxieties: the crisis of the old aristocracy, the increasing independence of women in society and the creation of a new juridical (and political) system marked by an institutionalised form of control. In turn, detective stories tended to subordinate this framework to the slow and scientifically oriented process of revelation. This peculiar characteristic, as well as its cultural implications, can be understood also by considering the impact that evolutionary thought had on the Victorian frame of mind.