A Very British Murder

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By Chloe Penman / © BBC 2013 Lucy Worsley in Churchyard where a boy in Rode Hill House murder is buried in A VERY BRITISH MURDER. This multiple murder saw the beginning of the gruesome correlation between lurid reporting of a crime that sparked a massive increase in the sales of newspapers and thus engendered the interest of the public. Several high interest and notorious crimes are highlighted throughout and the murderers lives described. She argues (as others have done) that the Golden Age puzzle with its fairly defined rules developed as a response to the horrors of WW1 and fed into a society that wanted something a bit cosier than the blood-curdling melodramas of the past.

If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies. This can be because you're in a country where BritBox is not available, or because you're using a VPN. The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul by one of our finest historians.Informative and entertaining, The Art of the English Murder is likely to appeal to those that are interested in the evolution of crime stories and detective novels. The book opens in 1811 with the famous Ratcliffe Highway murders in London and the public outcry that followed when it became evident that there was no mechanism to investigate such a terrible crime effectively. With the limiting of the death penalty to fewer crimes, a rise in literacy and the increasing urbanisation of society, Worsley argues that the perfect set of conditions were present for murder to become mass entertainment. Mrs Radcliffe with 'The Mysteries of the Udolpho', 1794, was arguably the first to be followed by the famous 'Penny Bloods' that gave the public the gore that they wanted. The notes at the end may have been helpful but it took a lot of effort to connect some of them to the text.

In the early nineteenth century, violent death was the new obsession that would come to dominate the British entertainment industry. A couple of times the author describes finding places in London today connected to murders that happened a long time ago - I really enjoyed this link and would have been happy to see more of this. While the information presented wasn't new to me, I appreciated the excellent organization and thoroughness of Worsley's investigation. This book was first published in 2013 and it would be interesting to see what the author thinks of the recent explosion in availability of true crime podcasts and "tik tok detectives". Rather like the Ripper himself, Holmes was powerful and mysterious, as if he were the moral flipside of the most evil killer of his age.From the start of the 19th century, a new form of entertainment developed that was based on the British obsession with death.

Sayers and Agatha Christie as well as the part they played in the rapid growth in popular crime fiction and finishes with the decline of the genteel murderer to the more thriller based popular fiction that we still enjoy today. After the Golden Age, Worsley rushes through hard-boiled fiction and today’s appetite for the noir and the serial-killer, but this last chapter is really just a post-script. Since 2003, while working at Historic Royal Palaces, she has continued publishing historical non-fiction for adults and historical fiction for 11-14 years olds. Worsley examines changing public attitudes towards crime and law enforcement, particularly from the Georgian period, where she begins, through the Victorians. Worsley’s book is stuffed with interesting insights into our love of crime, although sometimes the pacing can be a little uneven, no doubt because of its inception as a television programme.I haven't seen the TV programme/series on which this book was based, but can envisage it from the structure of this book and the general style in which it comes across. It was not clear what each chapter was intended to deal with and subjects often seemed to reappear in the middle of a chapter that appeared to be about something else, connections were not made clear. She also takes in the setting up of the police force, the rise of the detective, Madame Tussaud’s enduring fame (during the First World War, the Chamber of Horrors was, apparently, used as a testing ground for trainee soldiers, who had to prove their worth by spending a night in the exhibit) and the Golden Age of detective fiction between the wars when the Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers) ruled.

Examining several "high profile" cases - the most interesting of which for me was the Ratcliff Highway Murders as I knew nothing about them - this traces back the roots of the public fascination for all things macabre in a very accessible way. We get a bit of history of policing, punishment and the horrific Regency murders, Ratcliff Highway murders https://en. It is a tale of dark deeds and guilty pleasures, a riveting investigation into the British soul by one of our finest historians.She suggests that the subsequent theories about the crimes, which focus on privileged members of society, such as the Duke of Clarence, instead of considering that the perpretrator was a working class man native to the area, stem from perceptions originating from this drama which caused a huge sensation at the time. By the time hanging was abolished in 1964, the detective story was being replaced by the spy thriller.