Ebook The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
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The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
Ebook The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
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Review
“Lively. Worsley’s goal isn’t to provide a history of crime or crime writing, but to show how the British enjoyed and consumed the idea of murder.†- The New York Times Book Review“Worsley's book covers a great deal of ground and provides an excellent overview of how the consumption of crime became a dominant part of our cultural landscape.†- The Sunday Times (London)“Delightful.†- Book Riot“Worsley explains England's love affair with scandals, lurid murders and executions, exhibit[ing] her exceptional knowledge of social and literary England. Simply put, murder was the TV of the Victorian era, an escape from everyday woes. Worsley ably shows how audiences drove writers, actors and purveyors of news to satisfy their morbid curiosities.†- Kirkus Reviews“Fascinating. This riveting cultural history will enthrall fans of British crime novels as well as readers of true crime.†- Library Journal (starred review)“Lively, lucid, and wonderfully lurid. Worsley's vivid account excites as much as its sensational subject matter, and edifies, too, thanks to her learned explications.†- Publishers Weekly (starred review and PW Pick of the Week)“Irresistible. Crisp, clear and good to the last sentence.†- The Buffalo News“Worsley captures this bloody love affair very well.†- The Independent“A brief, absorbing history lesson on how the UK’s obsession with bloody deeds changed not only methods of law enforcement, but fertilized the roots of modern popular culture.†- Bookgasm“The fictional detective is part of our way of seeing the world now, and this is an amusing book to show how our fascination with murder (which we ought to find nothing but repellent) made it happen.†- The Columbus Dispatch
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About the Author
Lucy Worsley, Ph.D., is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Kew Palace in England. Please visit www.lucyworsley.com.
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Product details
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Pegasus Books; 1 edition (October 15, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781605986340
ISBN-13: 978-1605986340
ASIN: 1605986348
Product Dimensions:
6.4 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
35 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#496,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Besides rain, cricket, afternoon tea, and The Queen herself there is nothing considered more quintessentially English than a good murder mystery. Lucy Worsley, whose wit and sparkle enhance her intellect and solid scholarship, in The Art Of The English Murder examines the most famous English mystery writers and some of the most infamous of the murders which helped to inspire them.Murder, of course, has been a part of history as long as humans have, but the modern fascination with that particular crime dates from the beginnings of the nineteenth century. A newly literate population that was eager for entertainment, snatched up broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets which carried the news of the day. No news was more intriguing than stories of dastardly murders, the bloodier the better. Newly organized police forces in the burgeoning industrial cities strove to track down and bring to justice the murderers, and the reports of their investigations fascinated the reading public as well. Worsley starts her history here, examining famous murderers like William Palmer and Madeleine Smith, still unsolved mysteries like Jack the Ripper and the Rode House murder, Jack Whicher and other police investigators, and, of course, the writers and novelists who produced elaborate fictions based on the crimes that filled the popular press. These included Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu among many others. Worsley then goes on to examine the rise of the "middle class murderer" and the rise of forensic science in the late nineteenth century (the heyday of Conan Doyle) and then really hits her stride with the "Golden Age" of detective fiction: the interwar period during which Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edgar Wallace, Ngaio Marsh and many others filled bookshops and libraries with their ingenious tales. Eventually, with the rise of the thriller and the psychological mystery, the straight detective story focussing on the mechanics of crime solving fell out of favor,although murder mysteries produced by Alfred Hitchcock and others still found an audience.Readers who enjoy The Art Of The English Murder will also find Judith Flanders' The Invention Of Murder, The Suspicions Of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale, The Poisoner by Stephen Bates, and Sandra Hempel's The Inheritance Powder, among many other recent works, of interest.
This is a fascinating exploration into uncovering a lost world, but a world that existed not that long ago. For example, I had no idea that puppet shows were the way that people in the hinterlands experienced theater in the 19th century, until the advent of trains that could take visitors to London for the day, but they were, and a popular form of theater was staging famous murders for entertainment.This is a throw-away fact, but in discussing the main topic of the book - the ability of people to draw entertainment value out of murder - one subject leads to another.The book starts with famous murder cases that caught the attention of the public in the 1820s and 1830s. The author, Lucy Worsley - who I assume wrote this as a companion to a BBC documentary - discusses the murders in detail, along with the public fascination with the crimes, the criminal justice system, the songs that were made out of the crimes, and similarly details. We learn that broadsheets catered to a newly literate culture and were distributed by singing patterers or performing patterers, who drew the attention of the crowds with the busking entertainment. Again, we learn the rich, lived details of this society.The first part of the book is mostly about the crimes, the criminals and the newly developing police forces, starting with the Thames Patrol, the Bow Street Runners, and, eventually, the Metropolitan police. I'd always known that Sir John Fielding had a hand in starting the Bowe Street Runners, but I was - I think - surprised to learn that the Runners were actually started by Sir Henry Fielding, who was the author of Tom Jones. The Metropolitan Police wore blue uniforms in order to assure Londoners that they were not being subjected to military supervision by the army, which would have worn red.By the close of the 19th century, however, the focus turns to literary murder. We are introduced to precursors to "Detective Fiction," including the "Penny Bloods" and the "sensation novels." We also get an introduction to the writers who were turning out this literature in the 19th century, and, thereby, capitalizing on the public's taste for murder, as well as directing and shaping that taste.Although Jack the Ripper is mentioned in the subtitle, there is not much on that subject. Nonetheless, Worsley has an interesting theory about Jack the Ripper. She implies that much of what we think we know about Jack the Ripper was concocted by the newspaper man who allegedly received the letter where Jack was given his nickname. Moreover, Worsley finds it significant that "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" had premiered shortly before the Ripper murders, thereby whetting the public expectations about what a serial murder might look like.I had to chuckle at one point at the differences between ourselves and our greatX4 grandparents. Worsley describes how the public reacted to a particularly brutal slaying of a family inside their home:"From this point on, though, events became confused and, ultimately, mishandled. The Thames Police were called in, but these official visitors were accompanied by a whole swarm of unofficial sightseers who wished to see the murdered bodies laid out dead upon their beds. The crime scene was thoroughly contaminated. What forensic and material evidence there was they were not skilled in reading: it took 12 days before anyone noticed that the maul in the kitchen was marked with the initials JP."The idea of sightseers wanting to unofficially wander through the horrific murder scene tickled my funny bone for no particular reason, except that it suggests how different we are from them. But even this odd fact becomes a point of departure for a keen observation about how and why we are different from out ancestors. Worsley provides an explanation for that difference:"To modern eyes, one of the more distasteful aspects of the Ratcliffe Highway Murder was the way that hundreds of people traipsed through the Marrs’ house in the days following the crime. They came in order to ogle at the dead bodies of the victims, laid out upon their beds, and they came in huge numbers. The Times reported: ‘The sensation excited by these most ferocious murders has become so general, and the curiosity to see the place where they were committed so intense, that Ratcliffe Highway was rendered almost impassable by the throng of spectators.’ There were two good reasons why this ghoulish practice was much more acceptable then than now. Firstly, both birth and death were much more part of normal domestic life. Today both processes have been medicalized, and very often shuffled off into a hospital rather than a person’s home. Regency people were much more used to relatives dying at home in their own beds, and most women gave birth at home. The laying-out of a corpse in the front room, so that friends and neighbours could come to pay their respects, was normal practice. There was also a strong Irish presence in east London, and the idea of the ‘wake’ – visiting the home of a dead person in order to see them in their coffin, and contributing money so that the family could hold a gathering with drinking and partying – even now lingers on in Ireland after being forgotten on this side of the sea."The past is a different country; they do things differently there.This description of the internment of the putative murderer in 1811 highlights that observation:"The procession stopped for 15 minutes outside No. 29, the house where the Marrs died. Now a member of the crowd climbed up on to the cart and forcibly turned the dead man’s head to look at the home of ‘his’ victims, confronting him with what he had done. He was eventually taken to a crossroads, the conventional burying place for a suicide. At the junction of the new Commercial Road and Cannon Street, his body was ‘tumbled out of the cart’, lowered into a grave and ‘someone hammered a stake through his heart’. This last action was to ensure that an unquiet soul would not go wandering. The veracity of the report seemed to be confirmed in 1886, when gas pipes were being buried. At the same road junction, workmen digging a trench discovered a skeleton, buried at a depth of 6 feet, face down and with a stake through its heart."Yikes!Staking the heart of the dead so that they won't come back as vampires? In the 19th century?This book covers some of the same territory as Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre, which is one of the reasons I wanted to read it. But Murder by Candlelight pretty solidly stays in the era prior to 1850. Thus, in both books, Thomas de Quincy and the Elstree Murder are covered. This book moves beyond the 1850s and well into modern literature, particularly the feminist detective fiction. If I have one criticism it is that the last section is taken over by a feminist approach to detective fiction where the interest is exclusively on mysteries written by women or about women detectives. There is nothing wrong with such an interest, of course, but, certainly, there was more to English detective writing than Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Allingham. There was G.K. Chesterton, for example, who gets mentioned but not discussed. It seems hardly fair to allow other great writers to become forgotten or ignored because of the obsession of the moment. There is a bit more about Arthur Conan Doyle, but, then, it is hard to ignore Sherlock Holmes.That said, the discussions in this book are educational, insightful and interesting. The authorial voice often breaks in to share some particular experience she has had concerning her research, and those interludes are invariably interesting and on point.Murder is not a bad way to learn about our recently forgotten ancestors.
I really enjoyed this book! It's the history of London and the police force, notable murders that took place. I liked it so much I purchased 2 more of Ms. Worsley's books; If Walls Could Talk and Tea Fit for a Queen...she has a way of making history come to life in her well researched books. Tea Fit for a Queen has some great recipes in it and If Walls Could Talk takes you through the English Castle/Manor/house room by room which sounds boring but really was fascinating.
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