A Very British Murder

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There appeared both real and fictional detectives as new heroic figures in the battle against crime.

Whether you're looking for some textbooks for university, the latest biography or a travel guide - you'll find what you need in our categories.I’d love to have come to one of your September talks, but couldn’t get to any of the places you’re going to.

This non-fiction book outlines the history of British Crime- both real and fictional and their obsession with crime and murder. 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. Here she shares its secrets and explores the history of this phenomenon in forensic detail, examining not only the crimes themselves but also how murder became a form of middle-class entertainment through novels, plays, artefacts and the press.

It wasn't really an issue, and I'd be glad to see the television series if it were available (some of the ballads, puppet shows, and dramas she describes would be interesting to see! 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.

As this thrilling true crime documentary on BBC Select concludes, historian Lucy Worsley looks at the Golden Age of crime fiction at the start of the 20th Century. 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. The book traces the development of the British crime novel from its beginnings in the Georgian Sensation novels and fascination with real life crimes, through the Victorian crime novels -Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and into the Golden Age of classic detective novels in the 1920s and 30s -Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.

In this book, which accompanies her TV series, historian Lucy Worsley explores the nation’s interest in both true crime, and its fictional representations, between 1800 and 1946. Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, just months before the series of brutal slayings in Whitechapel that are chalked up to the unknown serial killer nicknamed ‘Jack the Ripper’. By Chloe Penman / © BBC 2013 Lucy Worsley with Ratcliff Highway murder weapon in A VERY BRITISH MURDER. He had the good fortune to be putting pen to paper shortly after one of the first notorious true life cases, the Ratcliff Highway Murders in east London in 1811.