A VERY BRITISH MURDER by Lucy Worsley
A companion piece to her TV series of the same name, this is an engaging tour through the history of British murder, news coverage, and crime fiction, from about 1800 to the 1940s. It covers the creation of modern police, the invention of popular newspapers, and – often with a nice feminist view – the highpoints of novel…. Novels. It’s a little bit scattershot, but never less than fascinating, and as chatty and good humoured as her TV shows would have us expect. There’s crime trivia, social trivia, writing trivia, etc galore; it’s wonderful, and there’s also some great suggested reading in it too.
But there has to be a downside, and that comes in two forms – there are quite a few places where she’s openly and admittedly letting her sources and other writers she admires basically dictate her views – we all do that, I guess – and there’s also an annoying number of flaws in Random House/BBC Books production of it, with historical murderers exchanging surnames between chapters – Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters becomes Edith Bywaters and Freddie Thompson between chapters – or between the body text and the picture captions.
Still, niggles aside, it’s a great read, and there are several books mentioned in it that I’m now desperate to find and read...
