The literary output of the Canadian-born author Grant Allen, who was brought up in Birmingham from the age of 13 and attended King Edward's School,[84] was prodigious and varied even by Victorian standards.[85] The Scottish critic Andrew Lang called him "the most versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our age".[86] Allen is best known for his best-selling but controversial 1895 novel The Woman Who Did, whose tragic plot combined support for free love with opposition to the institution of marriage, and whose success scandalised Victorian society.[87] He is also noted for innovations in detective fiction, creating independent-minded female detectives modelled on the feminist ideal of the New Woman in Miss Cayley's Adventures; and for playing with the conventions of the crime genre in An African Millionaire, where the criminal is the hero, and the short story "The Great Ruby Robbery", where the culprit turns out to be the detective investigating the crime.[88] Allen's incorporation of his own scientific preoccupations into novels such as the time travel-based The British Barbarians also made him an important early pioneer of science fiction.