20th Century Prewar America:Novels Set in Canada and the U.S. from 1900 to Before World War I
Canada 
Not until after World War I did the United States become a major world power. Before then, it was still a raw, young country in the eyes of the world. Canada did not gain legislative autonomy from England until 1931. For both countries, the prewar period was a time of rapid economic growth. Particularly in the industrialized U.S., where conditions in the late nineteenth century had exploited workers, this was a period of progressive social reform. Teddy Roosevelt became President in 1901 and championed anti-trust laws. Novelists like Upton Sinclair were instrumental in alerting the public to the bad practices of certain big businesses. Vividly portraying conditions in the meat-packing industry that exploited workers and produced meats in disgustingly unsanitary conditions, Sinclair's novel The Jungle led to the creation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Alaska and Hawaii had not yet been admitted to the U.S. as states, but the few novels set there during this time period are included in this section for the sake of convenience. Prewar Canada
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Thomas B. Costain, Son of a Hundred Kings Rosalind Laker, What the Heart Keeps Howard Norman, The Bird Artist (1994), about a Newfoundland artist who paints birds and has murdered the local lighthouse keeper. Review at the Los Angeles Times Susan Vreeland, The Forest Lover (2004), about the early twentieth century Canadian artist Emily Carr and her determination to paint the totem poles of British Columbia. Mysteries Set in Prewar Canada
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Allan Levine, Sins of the Suffragette Allan Levine, The Bolshevik's Revenge The United States Before WWI
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Kevin Baker, Dreamland (1999), about New York City and Coney Island around 1910. Charity Barger, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (2008), about a woman factory worker who falls in love with the factory owner's nephew in 1911, just before a disastrous fire; self-published. Andrea Barrett, The Air We Breathe (2007), about wealthy patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium in 1916. Lauren Belfer, City of Light (2005), about the headmistress of a girls' school in 1901 Buffalo, New York, as Niagara Falls is harnessed to produce electrical power. T.C. Boyle, The Women (2009), about the unfortunate women who loved Frank Lloyd Wright. Alan Brennert, Honolulu (2009), about a young Korean woman who goes to Hawaii as a "picture bride" and discovers her husband is a poor laborer, not the wealthy man she expected. Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree (1984), about a fourteen-year-old boy whose grandfather elopes with a woman half his age three weeks after his wife dies in 1906, causing a scandal in their small Georgia town. Rebecca Chace, Leaving Rock Harbor (2010), a coming-of-age story about a fourteen-year-old girl who moves with her family to Rock Harbor, Massachusetts, where her father gets work in a cotton mill and she becomes friends with two young men, one the son of a senator, the other a mill worker. Alan Cheuse, The Bohemians Colleen Coble, The Lightkeeper's Daughter (2010), Christian romance about a young woman who takes a job as a governess for a wealthy California family in 1907. J. California Cooper, Life Is Short But Wide Frank DeFord, Bliss, Remembered (2010), about an American woman who competes as a swimmer in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where she falls in love with a young German man. E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975), about a wealthy New England family whose lives are changed when Harry Houdini crashes his car into a telephone pole by their house in 1906. Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), a literary novel about Scottish emigrants in Montana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season (2006), about a Montana school superintendent who must close the state's one-room schools and his memories of 1909, the year he was thirteen, when he faced challenges above and beyond his mother's death, and a gifted schoolteacher came into his life. Carl Eeman, Encampment Louise Erdrich, A Plague of Doves (2009), about a 1911 murder of a rural family in North Dakota for which three innocent Ojibwe were blamed and lynched, and how it affects the life of a teenage girl in the 1970s. Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (1999), about a woman who takes on a priest's identity and ministers to the Ojibwe in North Dakota. Jack Finney, From Time to Time (1995), about a man who travels back in time to the early twentieth century to try to prevent World War I. Matthew Flaming, The Kingdom of Ohio (2009), the overlapping stories of a present-day antiques dealer in Los Angeles and two New Yorkers in 1901, a worker building the new subway system and a woman who claims to have time-traveled into the future from the "Lost Kingdom of Ohio." Janice Holt Giles, The Plum Thicket (1954), about a child in rural Arkansas in the summer of 1913. Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife (2009), about a wealthy businessman in Wisconsin and the scheming woman who responds to his advertisement for a wife in 1907. Alex Haley and David Stevens, Mama Flora’s Family (1998), a family saga about three generations of a black family from 1912 to the 1980s, co-authored by David Stevens and the author of Roots. Brian Hall, Fall of Frost (2008), a literary novel about the tormented life of poet Robert Frost, who began publishing his work during the early 1900s. Kathryn Harrison, The Seal Wife (2002), about a meteorologist in 1915 Alaska and his relationship with a strangely silent woman. Nancy Horan, Loving Frank (2007), a literary novel about a woman who has an affair with the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright after he designs a home for her and her husband. Review Beverly Jensen, The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay (2010), linked short stories about two sisters from rural New Brunswick beginning with their childhood in 1916 and following seventy years of their lives as they move from Canada to Boston and the Maine coast. Review at The New York Times Wayne Johnston, The Navigator of New York (2002), about arch-rivals Cook and Peary and their race to reach the North Pole first. W. Mae Kent, Titanic: The Untold Story Jane Kirkpatrick, A Flickering Light (2009), a coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of a career in photography in 1907, when it was considered to be hazardous work for men only; Christian message. Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees (2002), a darkly comic saga of a dysfunctional family centering on four sisters from Nova Scotia during the first half of the twentieth century. Adrienne MacDonnell, The Doctor and the Diva Paul Malmont, Jack London in Paradise (2009), about a Hollywood film maker who tracks down Jack London in Hawaii in the winter of 1915 and asks him to write one more script. David Mamet, The Old Religion (1997), about the Jewish community in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915. Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (2008), a literary novel about the life and death of Edgar J. Watson, a violent outlaw from the Florida Everglades; Shadow Country won the 2008 National Book Award and is a condensed reworking in a single volume of three novels originally published separately as Killing Mister Watson (in 1990), Lost Man's River (in 1997) and Bone by Bone (in 1999). Johanna Moran, The Wives of Henry Oades (2010), about an English emigrant in California who remarries, believing his former wife dead in New Zealand where she and their children were kidnapped by Maori, and the troubles that ensue after she and the surviving children turn up in California and he and his new wife take them in. Gary E. Parker, Highland Hopes (2001), about a family in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina during the early twentieth century, #1 in the Blue Ridge Legacy series; Christian message. James Patterson and Richard DiLallo, Alex Cross's Trial (2009), a novel-within-a-novel written by series protagonist Alex Cross about his grandfather, a Washington D.C. lawyer who returns to his hometown in Mississippi in 1906 at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt to investigate rumors of the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; other novels in the series are contemporary. Mary Fremont Schoenecker, Finding Fiona (2008), romantic suspense about a young New England teacher who finds herself traveling a hundred years back in time to the beginning of the twentieth century. Mary Lee Settle, The Scapegoat Walt Shiel, Devil in the North Woods (2005), about a historical wildfire in Metz, Michigan, in 1908; self-published. Jane Smiley, Private Life (2010), about a Missouri woman who in 1905 at the advanced age of twenty-seven marries an astronomer who is both brilliant and emotionally unbalanced. Review Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), a classic coming-of-age novel about a girl in an impoverished family in Brooklyn, New York, during the early twentieth century; technically not historical fiction. Danielle Steel, A Good Woman (2008), about a young woman born into a wealthy New York family whose life is utterly changed with the sinking of the Titanic and her decision to volunteer and become a medic during World War I. Thomas Steinbeck, In the Shadow of the Cypress (2010), about Chinese immigrants in California in 1906 and a present-day marine biologist who connects their story with that of some much older Chinese artifacts found in California during their time. Irving Stone, Jack London: Sailor on Horseback D.J. Taylor, Ask Alice (2009), about an American girl who becomes a "fallen woman" after being taken advantage of while on a train trip in 1904, and her rise to high society in London in the 1920s. M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (2008), about a West Virginian born in 1903, orphaned and raised by a mountain woman, and dogged throughout his long and eventful life by a mouth infection. Laura Mazzuca Toops, The Latham Loop Laura Mazzuca Toops, Slapstick Katherine Webb, The Legacy (2010), about sisters who, sorting through their grandmothers belongings after she dies, uncover a family secret relating to an ancestress, a society heiress who comes to Oklahoma at the turn of the twentieth century. Gene Wilder, The Woman Who Wouldn't (2008), a love story about a Cleveland concert violinist sent to a health resort in Germany where he meets a beautiful and reserved woman who seems impervious to his efforts at flirting. Terri Wiltshire, Carry Me Home (2009), about a young woman in Alabama who claims to have been raped by a black vagrant in 1904, and the child she bears. Mysteries set in the U.S. Before WWI
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Rhys Bowen, Death of Riley (2002), about an Irish immigrant in New York whose new work assisting a private investigator suddenly becomes more challenging when the investigator is murdered; #2 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, For the Love of Mike (2003), about an Irish immigrant in New York whose work as a private investigator is hampered because she is a woman; #3 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, In Like Flynn (2005), about a female private investigator whose latest assignment, a case of kidnapping, takes her to the Hudson River Valley; #4 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, Oh Danny Boy (2006), about a female private investigator hunting for a serial killer of prostitutes; #5 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, In Dublin's Fair City (2007), about a female private investigator whose trip back to Ireland lands her in the middle of a murder case; #6 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (2008), about a female private investigator who takes on a wrongly suspended police captain as an associate; #7 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, In a Gilded Cage (2009), about a female private investigator trying to find out what became of an orphan's inheritance; #8 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Rhys Bowen, The Last Illusion (2010), about a female private investigator hired to protect illusionist Harry Houdini after an onstage performance goes horribly wrong; #9 in the Molly Murphy mystery series. Review Clive Cussler, The Chase (2007), a thriller about a detective on the trail of a ruthless bank robber who murders all the witnesses; #1 in the Isaac Bell Adventures series. Clive Cussler and Justin Scott, The Wrecker (2009), a thriller about a detective sent to hunt down a saboteur who has been destroying railroad facilities along the Southern Pacific line in 1907 and leaving murdered accomplices in his wake; #2 in the Isaac Bell Adventures series. Clive Cussler and Justin Scott, The Spy (2010), a thriller about a detective hired to investigate the death of a gunship designer in 1908 during the military build-up leading to the First World War; #3 in the Isaac Bell Adventures series.
Dianne Day, Fire and Fog (1996), about a young woman in San Francisco who wakes up amid the Great Earthquake of 1906; #2 in the Fremont Jones mystery series. Dianne Day, The Bohemian Murders (1997), about a young woman who follows her suitor to Carmel-by-the-Sea after the San Francisco Earthquake and takes a job at the lighthouse, where a woman's body washes up, involving her in another murder investigation; #3 in the Fremont Jones mystery series. Dianne Day, Emperor Norton's Ghost (1998), about a young woman who returns to a San Francisco rebuilding after the 1906 Earthquake and worries about her new friend, whose involvement in spiritualism becomes dangerous when a killer begins to stalk the city's mediums; #4 in the Fremont Jones mystery series. Dianne Day, Death Train to Boston (1999), about a young San Francisco woman and her partner whose train trip to Boston is disrupted when the train blows up and they are rescued by an odd man who leads a group of renegade Mormons; #5 in the Fremont Jones mystery series. Dianne Day, Beacon Street Mourning (2000), about a young woman who wonders whether her stepmother might be implicated in her father's death, until her stepmother is shot to death; #6 in the Fremont Jones mystery series.
Anthony Flacco, The Last Nightingale (2007), a thriller about a twelve-year-old boy who loses his family during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the detective who is stalking the serial killer who murdered them; #1 in the Randall Blackburn series. Anthony Flacco, The Hidden Man (2008), a thriller about a detective and his adopted son who must find the killer who is stalking the mesmerist at the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair; #2 in the Randall Blackburn series. Irene Fleming, The Edge of Ruin (2010), a humorous mystery about a woman whose husband recklessly decides to become a movie producer in 1909, flouting Thomas Edison's ruthless determination to dominate the film industry. Review or Author Interview Thomas Keneally, A Victim of the Aurora (1977), about a group of gentlemen explorers in 1909 who discover someone in their midst is a murderer during an expedition to the South Pole. Stefanie Pintoff, In the Shadow of Gotham (2009), about a New York police detective who relocates to a smaller town in the wake of his wife's tragic death in 1904, only to be faced with a brutal homicide to investigate just months later. Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder (2006), a thriller which imagines what may have happened during Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to New York which led him to call Americans "savages" and "criminals."
Victoria Thompson, Murder on St. Mark's Place (2000), about a New York midwife who helps a police detective investigate murder; #2 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Gramercy Park (2001), about a New York midwife whose discovery of the cause of a baby's mysterious illness uncovers a case of scandalous greed and deception; #3 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Washington Square (2002), about a New York midwife who helps a police detective investigate a case of murder linked to a seductress caught in her own schemes; #4 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Mulberry Bend (2003), about a New York midwife who helps a police detective investigate a case of murder arising from the squalor in the poor districts; #5 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Marble Row (2004), about a New York midwife who helps a police detective investigate the death of a wealthy industrialist in an explosion, a case he thinks is arson and she thinks is more complicated; #6 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Lenox Hill (2005), about a New York midwife who agrees to help a family find out who impregnated their mentally impaired daughter; #7 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder in Little Italy (2006), about a New York midwife who suspects that a woman did not die from complications of childbirth as her family insists, but was murdered; #8 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder in Chinatown (2007), about a New York midwife who investigates a case of murder in a family of mixed Irish-Chinese heritage; #9 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Bank Street (2008), about a New York midwife and a police detective whose friendship is threatened when he investigates the murder of a doctor; #10 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Waverly Place (2009), about a New York midwife and a police detective who must investigate after her mother attends a seance that ends in murder; #11 in the Gaslight series. Victoria Thompson, Murder on Lexington Avenue (2010), about a New York midwife and a police detective who investigate the murder of a man who opposed his deaf daughter's wish to marry a deaf teacher on the grounds of eugenics; #12 in the Gaslight series. Top of Page
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(1950), about a young boy sent to Canada around the turn of the twentieth century to join his father, who finds upon arriving that his father is dead.
(1982), about the early twentieth century American journalist and Communist John Reed and his wife Louise Bryant.
(2009), a family saga narrated by a 91-year-old woman and her 105-year-old mother about life in Oklahoma beginning with the arrival of the railroad; Christian message.
(2009), a novel of alternative history that imagines what might have happened if 5,000 black Civil War veterans had attended the July 1913 reunion at Gettysburg along with the 54,000 white veterans.
(2008), about a black passenger on the Titanic; self-published. 
(2010), about a Boston woman who plans an opera career, her husband, and the obstetrician they consult in the hope that his experimental technique will help her conceive after years of a childless marriage.
(1980), about miners in 1912 West Virginia; #4 in the Beulah Quintet (#5, The Killing Ground, is set in the 1980s).
(2003), about the birth of the Hollywood film industry; #1 in the Harold Gilbert series.
(2003), about a Hollywood comedian caught unprepared in 1927 when the "talkies" become more popular than silent films; #2 in the Harold Gilbert series; self-published.