It’s been two years, but I found another book that is a better alternative to Murder by Candlelight. I previously recommended Savage Appetites, but while that was a great book, it was very narrowly focused on female fans of true crime, while A Very British Murder take a more general look at the development of our fascination with murder.

As the subtitle says, this book is “the curious story of how crime was turned into art.” It starts with De Quincey’s essay on opium, shifts to his essay on murder and then we meet the first case that sparked intense interest: the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway Murders. From there, the book goes on to look at other infamous cases, the rise of the detective, and ends with the development of the Golden Age of Mysteries.

Since this book is about our obsession with crime (mostly true but also fictional), the emphasis here is not on the various cases. Worsley gives us enough information to understand what’s happening, and then she delves into the events surrounding the case. For example, the murder of Maria Marten inspired one of the most popular ballads of 1828 and from there, the book looks at other murder paraphernalia, such as ceramic figures. The next chapter continues the story by looking at the puppets that were used to stage a reenactment of the murder, which launches us into the history of these shows. If you’re interested, the book recommends this video from the Victoria & Albert museum which shows how the puppets would have been used.

One interesting thing I took from this book is the way the Victorian era has been misunderstood as people imprisoned by etiquette and respectability. According to Worsley, this can be attributed to Lytton Strachey’s 1918 book ‘Eminent Victorians’. But when we put the work into context, that Strachey was part of the Bloomsbery set, we can see how this might be an unbalanced picture of the Victorian era.

The last section of the book was on the Golden Age of mysteries and while I think The Golden Age of Murder is the book to read if you want to dive deep into the topic, I still appreciated the insights the book had. I think one thing that cannot be stressed enough is that the Golden Age writers were writing after World War I and “they were writing not to challenge society or to stir things up. They were using their pens to heal.”

And this is a little bit before the Golden Age, but I also liked the discussion on Lady Audley’s Secret. I thought, when rereading the book last year, that it was a bit unfair to see Lady Audley as a complete villainess and I was happy to see that I’m not the only one that thinks that way. Worsley even points out that one of the crimes Lady Audley was accused of was abandoning her own child – which was something her first husband and the hero of the novel, Robert Audley, also do! The men just don’t get criticised for it.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book! I think A Very British Murder has managed to use various crimes to paint a picture of how British society evolved, why the crimes were fascinating, and linked true crime to crime fiction. I’ll just end with this paragraph from the postscript which I think sums up the book pretty well:

“All through writing this book I’ve been worried about being too flippant about murder. It’s not all good clean fun. There is horror here, and tragedy, beneath the puppetry and pageantry. But among the gore and horror, we’ve also glanced aside at the history of literature, of education, of women’s place in society and of justice.”