The Art of the English Murder

The Art of the English Murder

By Lucy Worsley
$17.99
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“Lucy Worsley’s lively book…traces the growth of this industry through some of the era’s most avidly followed killings. Her 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…A bonus of The Art of the English Murder is Worsley’s interest in women writers, partly the grandes dames of the 1920s and ‘30s like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but also several whose work has been forgotten.”

New York Times Book Review

Murder: a dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy—and a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?

In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime—and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul.