"The Tonbridge Outrage" by John Brookland

The true story of rape and murder in early twentieth century England. 

This is the true crime story of the rape and murder of seven-year-old Frances O'Rourke in the Kentish town of Southborough, near Tonbridge on New Year's Eve 1901. It contains details of the investigation by the newly established Kent detective police, who were hampered by the rudimentary state of forensics at the time and built their case from (a lot of) circumstantial evidence. It details the trial of the accused and the aftermath. 

It was mostly well written although in the first few chapters some of the reconstructed dialogue felt stilted. The author was particularly good at giving a sense of the period and explaining the legal procedures which sometimes felt very alien to modern ideas. I appreciated the provision of maps and photographs to help the reader follow what sometimes felt like a deluge of witness testimony.

Selected quotes:

• "Shafts of sunlight shone diagonally across the court as though to try and brighten the sombre proceedings." (Ch 11)
• "It is a common misunderstanding that someone who can commit such an extremely degenerate and horrific crime must be a monster, but paradoxically many commit such crimes so that they can feel normal in the hope it will remove a sense of impotency." (Ch 13)

August 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"American Heiress" by Jeffrey Toobin

 This is the story of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, her subsequent radicalisation and recruitment into the SLA, and the subsequent bank robberies, shootings and kidnappings, including her eventual capture and trial. It's a fascinating story, recapturing a period in recent American history when the counterculture was producing urban guerrillas and the FBI seemed hopelessly inadequate. 

This is a typically American piece of reportage which follows the story step by step, offering little pen sketches of each of the major participants (and there are quite a few) in such a way that the main thrust of the narrative is never disrupted. Most of us will know how it ends ... but that doesn't matter. The writing is so clear and the narrative is so strong that it is page-turning reading. It becomes manifest that over the period of a few weeks Hearst was transformed from a rich student into a revolutionary; she may have initially seen this as a way to stay alive but the author makes it clear that she had ample opportunities to escape once she became a full member of the SLA so the defence of duress couldn't hold. 

So was she brainwashed? Her transformation happened very quickly (she was kidnapped on February 4th 1974, she joined the SLA on March 31st, participated in a bank robbery with a loaded gun on April 15th, and shot up a street on May 16th) with little coercion, and, once she was on remand and realised her legal peril, it was reversed equally quickly. Perhaps it serves as a warning how any one of us, given the circumstances, can change a whole outlook on and way of life.

Indeed, all of the members of the SLA had similar stories. Only one, the leader and only African American (in a group that purported to fight for the rights of African Americans but was disowned by the Black Panthers) was a career criminal. The others were actresses and students who moved from idealistic political activists, such as prison visiting, to acts of terrorism almost by accident. They seem to be playing at revolutionaries with their rambling manifestos and their military-style drills and their noms de guerre. In  many ways they were hopeless. When they tried to destroy a safe house full of evidence linking them to an assassination they forget to leave the windows open so the fire, staved of oxygen, goes out. When on the run, they are tracked down because they leave an envelope of cash (to pay a parking fine, which has the address of where the infringement occurred) in a getaway car. Bombs fail to go off, bullets are sprayed around causing no injuries (or guns go off accidentally, killing people). These were rank amateurs but they were heavily armed and, even though they numbered only nine at their maximum, created terror.

As often with books like this, the 'seven steps' rule means that names can be dropped. For example, before becoming a revolutionary Angela was a drama student working with Kevin Kline. The Reverend Jim Jones who subsequently brainwashed hundreds of his cult followers into committing mass suicide wanted to be involved with the food giveaway demanded as a ransom for Ms Hearst. 

Selected quotes:

• "DeFreeze was almost the opposite of a master criminal; he was most inventive in finding ways to get caught." (Ch 3)
• "They believed that sex was a basic human need, like food or shelter. Like those other necessities, sex should be shared in an egalitarian manner. ... This, in any event, was the theory. Predictably, the sexual merry-go-round had failed to maintain harmony within the house. Sexual tensions and rivalries among the comrades were epidemic, especially in the claustrophobic confines." (Ch 9)
• "In and around San Francisco, the music stopped when the 1980s arrived. There was, essentially, no more counterculture; the term became obsolete. Radical outlaws like the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army ... virtually disappeared altogether." (Aftermath)

June 2023; 339 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Mile End Murder" by Sinclair McKay

 A well-written account of a murder that happened in 1860. A wealthy but miserly widow, landlord of a mostly slum properties in London's East End, was battered to death, leading to a potential miscarriage of justice that, forty years later, attracted the attention of Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The author of this account offers his own solution to the crime.

It was well-told, beautifully paced, easy to read, and fascinating: it certainly had me turning the pages. It left me thankful that today the police have forensic evidence and that successful prosecutions require a rather higher standard of proof than in those days.

There were some nice comparisons between then and now:

"Part of the reason for social tensions in 1860 was the resentment felt by previously well-paid manual workers (many now casualised) for the new generations of poor incomers who were thought to be bringing fown streets by being prepared to live in squalid and even dangerous housing" (Ch 1)

It referenced the Ratcliff Road murders in 1811 which are the subject of The Maul and the Pear Tree by P D James and T A Critchley and the Road Hill House murders which are written about by Kate Summerscale in her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

I also wondered whether the Irish portion of the career of prime suspect Mullins might have inspired Conan Doyle to write his late Holmes novel The Valley of Fear and whether the description of the Chancery battles might have inspired Charles Dickens while writing Bleak House.

I noticed that The Mile End Murder received a favourable review from my old school mate Craig Brown, author of:

• One on One: 101 mini-biographies
• One Two Three Four: the story of the Beatles

A very enjoyable true crime book.

May 2023; 299 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Fatal North" by Bruce Henderson

This book is both another harrowing account of arctic exploration and a true crime mystery.

 In 1871, a US expedition on board the Polaris, led by Captain Francis Hall, attempted to reach the North Pole. They had reached North Greenland when Captain Hall died, following a short mystery illness, amid accusations that he had been poisoned. Sidney Buddington, the sailing master, took over as Captain. He, however, had a drinking problem and was terrified of getting stuck in the ice if they attempted top go any further north; he repeatedly refused permission for expeditions northwards. The crew became disorgnaised and mutinous. The ship did get stuck in the ice and then, during a panic when it was believed that the skip was sinking, half the crew were separated from the ship and marooned on an ice flow. They were then abandoned by Buddington and those aboard the ship. Those on the ice flow were kept alive through the efforts of a couple of eskimoes who built igloos on the floe and hunted seals to eke out their meagre provisions. Over the next 197 days, hungry and cold and in constant danger of the ice floe breaking up, they drifted 1500 miles south before being rescued by a whaler. This book attempts to answer the question of why the ice-floe men were abandoned by the Polaris party (which was also rescued, having had a rather better time of it) and whether Captain Hall was murdered. 

Selected quotes:

• "There was a paraselene - an illusion of multiple moons showing beside the true one, arranged so as to form an eerie but beautiful cross. The true moon was a surrounded by a halo, which also embraced two of the false ones, while the other mock moons had a separate halo, making a large circle concentric with the first. The two false moons nearest to the true one showed the colours of the prism." (Ch 8)
• "There was no tell-tale whistling of the wind among trees, for none existed here. Once out on the open plain, the wind struck full force without notice. The wind was felt before it was heard." (Ch 8)
• "Each berg presented, in contour, the effects of battles with wind and water, rain and storm, and the rough jostling with other bergs it had experienced." (Ch 15)

December 2022; 259 pages

Other books about travel, exploration and explorers, including Ninety Degrees North by Fergus Fleming can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Fact of a Body" by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

 A six-year-old boy is murdered by a paedophile. The author encounters this case while working as an intern for the law firm appealing the murderer's death sentence. The story haunts her because it awakens memories of when she was a child and was abused by her grandfather. 

The narration flips backwards and forwards between the story of the murder and the subsequent trials and the story of the author's own childhood and young adulthood. As usual with American literature - both fact-based and fiction - the narration includes a vast amount of specific detail and this makes the verisimilitude visceral. The ambiguities and uncertainties in the case are brilliantly brought out: there are many discrepancies between the confessions the murderer made; there are moral questions over the behaviour of the neighbour's family with which the murderer was living; the mother of the victim appeals for mercy for the murderer. It's a remarkable story, powerfully told.

Selected quotes:

• "I disembarked into air that was a not wet slap." (Prologue)
• "Each night now what we eat together comes from the garden as we race with bounty, trying to keep ahead of the coming spoilage." (Ch 8)
• "My parents have always loved money, always had the faith that more will appear if they spend it." (Ch 12)
• "Medical bills cost Bessie and Alcide the land they built on and the house they built on it, too." (Ch 15) This has to be the reason why we in the UK don't want the NHS to be replaced by as US-style health system; that and the premise of 'Breaking Bad': that the only recourse for a chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer is to manufacture illegal drugs.
• "Doesn't seem lonely if it's the best kind of aloneness you've ever had." (Ch 21)
• "Though it is called death row, it is where men live." (Ch 21)
• "The reception area looks like someone set it up long ago in a burst of optimism before succumbing to dust, time, and too much work." (Ch 22)

December 2022; 324 pages

This book, both in its subject matter and in its style, flipflopping between two narratives, reminded me of Dancing With the Octopus by Debora Harding

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Poisonous Solicitor" by Stephen Bates

 A step-by-step account of the true crime when solicitor Herbert Armstrong from Hay-on-Wye was accused of poisoning his wife using arsenic; a box of poisoned chocolates was also discovered. The wife certainly died from arsenic: sufficient to kill her was found in her corpse exhumed ten months later. There was certainly arsenic in the chocolates though no-one ever discovered who sent them. Armstrong was convicted, in a trial in which the judge rode roughshod over the rules, and hanged. 

This book covers all the details in chronological order but comes to no new conclusions; indeed, the author seems determined to avoid speculation. This makes the narrative rather pedestrian.

Selected quotes:

• "They also found two used condoms in a drawer under the washstand and several unused packets in other parts of the house" (Ch 8)

October 2022; 299 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Fortune Men" by Nadifa Mohamed

In 1952, Tiger Bay in Swansea is a melting pot of different nationalities; there are tensions between the indigenous white community and those they describe as 'black'. Somali Mahmood Mattan has married a white woman and fathered three sons but now, unemployed and a gambler with a criminal record for petty theft, he is separated. So, when local shopkeeper and money-lender Violet is found murdered, the police arrest Mahmood. This novel, based on a real case, and told in the present tense, mostly from the third-person perspective of Mahmood, chronicles what happens next.

It is beautifully written and explores Mahmood's life growing up in what was the British Somaliland and later became a merchant seaman, working in the engine room and travelling all over the world, before settling in Tiger Bay. The descriptions of the multi-cultural communities in Tiger Bay is also fascinating.

I found it a little slow at the beginning but towards the end I was page-turningly desperate to find out what happened. 

My only criticism is, as regular readers of this blog will guess, the use of foreign words. Use them, please, to give colour and authenticity. But offer translations as footnotes or a glossary.

The book was shortlisted for the both Booker Prize and the Costa award in 2021. Other Booker shortlisted novels, many reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Selected quotes:

• "Talking to the dregs of society. Knowing their habits better than they do. Holding your dinner down when confronted with their bestial acts, that's the knack to this job." (Ch 5)
• "She savours these moments first thing, before the past, present and future have solidified, when time feels timeless and screeching seagulls have safely navigated her from dreams of soundless wailing." (Ch 6)
• "The macalim [teacher] taught Mahmood that becoming a man was like turning wood into charcoal: a process of destruction until something pure and fiercely incandescent emerged." (Ch 7)
• "This didn't have to be the sum total of his life: this vista, this horizon, this language, these rules, these taboos, this food, these women, these laws, these neighbours. these enemies." (Ch 7)
• "One second he can understand everything, then they change frequency, like a fuzzy radio, and go into their university talk, leaving him with only isolated words to hold on to." (Ch 9)
• "They think a man stupid because he talks with an accent, but he wants to shout, 'I teach myself five languages, I know how to say "fuck you!" in Hindi and "love me" in Swahili'." (Ch 9)
• "In the touch of her hands they felt love, while he sensed pollution, in her laughter he heard betrayal, while they saw pleasure, in the distant gaze that he read as slyness, they perceived sadness." (Ch 10)
• "She was a tree that he wanted to chop down, and he used the law as his axe." (Ch 10)
• "'Yallah! Yallah! [O God] No way to put out the fire but to burn it!' Those were words to live by." (Ch 11)

September 2022; 370 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dancing with the Octopus" by Debora Harding

The true story of how, as a fourteen year old girl living in Nebraska, Harding was kidnapped at knifepoint from a church parking lot, raped and left to die in a cattle yard during a severe snowstorm. The book describes Harding's later battle with PTSD, a struggle which is exacerbated by the abusive behaviour of her mother.

And, in the end, the mother's psychological abuse and mental cruelty seem to be worse than the horrific ordeal Harding endured. The kidnap and rape was by a stranger and lasted for a few horrifying hours, the mother's abuse was repeated again and again for years.

A gripping true story, told in tiny snippets, with a backwards and forwards chronology, and the minute attention to detail characteristic of American reportage.

Selected quotes:

• "When Dad was home Mom was as different as a blackbird is to a vampire. Both have wings, but one sucks your blood." (p 25)
• "I'd been having night terrors all the way back to adolescence ... My unconscious strategy for dealing wiht them was to avoid sleep altogether." (p 33)
• "Mom claimed that she was of the 'School of Tough Love', like it was a parenting association that charged membership fees." (p 37)
• "The harder I tried to formulate a coherent thought, the more it eluded me. ... I felt nothing. An emotional lens closed, yet I became acutely aware of any sensory impression." (p 39)
• "These pieces were distinctly layered, as if I could separate one sensation from the other and tape them at different speeds." (p 40) 
• "Every word spoken rang with volume but no meaning." (p 40)
• "The world had gone completely flat" (p 40)
• "I was experiencing sudden paralysis, after which I would collapse. ... I appeared to others to be unconscious whilst being horrifyingly aware that I wasn't. ... I have no way of communicating. After a few minutes, when I feel control coming back, my limbs twitch, my jaw clenches, and if I fight it, the convulsing gets worse. Afterward I am utterly exhausted. ... I felt before these episodes ... emotional detachment, a sense of distance, and maybe fear." (p 90)
•  "Mom said Vivian left him [her husband] because he was cheating on her, which was an act of pure selfishness. Plenty of wives were dealing with cheating husbands in the 1950s, so they took antidepressants." (p 100)
• "These fits of paralysis had similarities to the lucid dream state of night terrors. Instead of being trapped in a dream - terrified and awake, yet clinically asleep - the situation was reversed. I appeared to be unconscious, asleep, even though I was awake and fully aware of my surroundings." (p 113)
• "It made me feel anxious yet affirmed, the way a horrid truth does when it feels right." (p 129)
• "I heard my mother tell whomever was on the other end of the phone that I no longer lived there." (p 162)
• "Charles slept the death of the angels that night." (p 205)
• "I was fifteen minutes late arriving home. Mom was standing at the door, furious. It woulod seem I had been grossly insensitive by worrying her." (p 209)
• "Trying to emotionally connect with Mom for any of us was like trying to fix a broken cup with a glue stick." (p 234)

March 2022; 359 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Seven shares in a gold mine" by Margaret Larkin

 "On Wednesday, September 24, 1952, a time bomb exploded in the forward baggage compartment of an airplane flying between Mexico City and Oaxaca." These are the first words of this true crime story. The author was on board the plane and recounts not only the immediate aftermath of the explosion but the ensuing police investigation. Seven of the passengers, poor people, had travel insurance for hundreds of thousands of pesos. It was clear that the explosion was deliberate. The investigation leads to charges and a trial. 

I read it years ago: it was a Readers' Union book club edition produced in 1960. I was fascinated then and the story gripped me again. It isn't just the crime itself, it is the insight it gives into what it was like in Mexico in the 1950s. For example, the capital was growing so rapidly that the landline telephone system couldn't keep up and the best way of getting a phone line was to buy shares in the telephone company. And the characters include the relationship between a Walter-Mitty-like no-hope dreamer and one of Mexico's leading opera singers. It would be great fiction and it is equally great fact. It reminded me of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

"Perhaps he made his fictions convincing to himself by nailing them down with slivers of truth." (Ch 14)

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I have been a big fan of the Readers' Union books which I inherited from the shelves of my parents. They have included:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

"The Camden Town Murder Mystery" by David Barrat

An exhaustive account of the murder of a prostitute, Emily Dimmock, in Camden Town in 1906. It seems unlikely that the author has left an stone unturned. Nevertheless, he cannot conclusively name the culprit. The most likely suspect seems to have been Robert Wood, a young man who had been seen consorting with Emily and whose postcard arranging a rendezvous with Emily on the night she was killed was found in her flat. Wood's subsequent behaviour was to lie repeatedly and to attempt to manufacture an alibi. However, amid much public celebration, Wood was acquitted at his trial. No one else was ever charged.

This book is an incredibly full account of every detail surrounding the murder, including that Camden Town was named a former Attorney General who lived at Camden Place in Chislehurst, that Emily once worked as a chamber maid at the Swan Hotel in Bedford, that one of the witnesses at the trial was an extraordinarily dodgy character who specialised in arson insurance claims when living in New Zealand and who dies in Australia as the result of an explosion whilst setting up another arson-based insurance fraud. Lots of really interesting stuff. Unfortunately the author's habit of chasing down every alley and revealing every detail left me reeling. It was difficult enough given that Emily associated with many dodgy men (she worked as a prostitute) and so there was a plethora of suspects but I found it very difficult to see any sort of Wood for the multiplicity of trees.

December 2018; 313 pages (of small print)

"Who killed little Johnny Gill?" by Kathryn McMaster

Two days after Christmas 1888 golden-haired seven-year old John Gill disappeared. Two days after that his naked body was discovered in a stables. He had been stabbed; his body had then been drained of blood, his legs cut off, his penis and anus removed, some of his internal organs removed and a pair of boot left in the chest cavity. The milkman in whose presence he had last been seen was arrested and accused of murder.

This true crime has been novelised in the form of a drama documentary. The story is clearly told although I would have loved some sort of map of the locality as I had trouble locating all the places.

A well written and interesting book. September 2018; 247 pages

"The Feather Thief" by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Yet another wonderful book lent to me by my mate Fred whose other contributions include:

• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• The Song of Achilles  a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller
• Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis

This book is about a flautist called Edwin who is obsessed with tying flies. The sort of flies that trout and salmon fishermen use. Except Edwin doesn't fish. He just likes tying as an art form. He is a member of a worldwide fly-tying community. And the problem they all have is that many flies are tied using feathers from birds who are now endangered and protected. So it is illegal to hunt them or trap them or kill them or take their feathers. This means that the feathers are in increasingly short supply. The major sources are old Victorian hats. Following the law of supply and demand this makes the highly sought after feathers increasingly expensive. So Edwin decides to break into the ornithological collection of the British Museum in Tring and steal some of their specimens of rare birds. 

Despite these bizarre details, this is a true story.

As with many such tales these days ( for example, The Mighty Dead: a superb analysis of the Iliad by an author who writes like a dream) the author tells the tale of his own obsessive  journey "into the feather underground, a world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers,cokeheads and big game hunters, ex-detectives and shady dentists" to track down the obsessives of the fly-tying community, to find the thief and, if possible, to retrieve some of the stolen specimens. Thus, the narrative opens with the crime, it then goes historical as the adventures of Alfred Russel Wallace, Victorian collector extraordinary and co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, are told, shipwreck and all, and then returning to the present day for Edwin's biography, the account of the police investigation and trial, and what happened next.

It's brilliant.


Many fascinating facts of which these are a small selection:

• “Alfred Russel Wallace stood on the quarterdeck of a burning ship, seven hundred miles off the coast of Bermuda, the planks heating beneath his feet, yellow smoke curling up through the cracks.” (first line)
• At the height of the Victorian collecting craze “Hats were designed with special compartments for storing specimens gathered on a stroll.” (p 18)
• The first birds of paradise skins “brought to Europe by Magellan's crew as a gift for the king of Spain in 1522, were missing their feet. ... leading Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, to name the species ... the footless bird of paradise. Many Europeans thus believed that the birds were inhabitants of a heavenly realm, always turning towards the sun, feeding on ambrosia and never descending to earth until their death. They thought the female laid her eggs on the back of her mate, incubating them as they sawed through the clouds.” (p 25 - 26)
• “Two and a half million years [ago] ... New Guinea ... emerged from the ocean just off the northern coast of Australia. Colliding tectonic plates drove up a spine of mountains that continue to grow faster than anywhere else on earth.” (p 30)
• “The deepwater strait between Bali and Lombok, which [Wallace] realised formed a dividing line between species found upon the Australian and Asian continental shelves, now appears on maps as ‘the Wallace line’.” (p 38)
• “Before the Hermes bag or Louboutin heel, the ultimate status indicator was a dead bird.” (p 46)
• “Entire bird skins were mounted on hats so ostentatiously large that women were forced to kneel in their carriages or ride with their heads out the window.” (p 47)
• “In 1775 ... there were twenty-five plumassiers in France. By 1860 there were 120, and by 1870 the number had skyrocketed to 280. So many people were working in the feather-plucking and bird-stuffing business that trade groups spring up to protect its workers, such as the Union of Raw Feather Merchants, the Union of Feather Dyers, and even a Society for Assistance to Children Employed in the Feather Industries.” (p 48)
• “When the Titanic went down in 1912, the most valuable and highly insured merchandise in its hold was forty crates of feathers.” (p 49)
• “In 1813 John James Audubon once travelled for three straight days under a single eclipsing horde of Passenger Pigeons.” (p 49 - 50) The species went extinct in 1914
• “By the end of the century, the sixty million American bison had been hunted down to three hundred.” (p 50)
• In 1496 “Wynkyn de Worde, a Dutch emigre running a newfangled printing press in Fleet Street in London. Published a Treatise of Fishing with an Angle”
• “Why should the rightful owner need to prove to someone in possession of stolen goods that they deserve to get them back?” (p 190)
• “Edwin and the feather underground were a bunch of historical fetishists, practising a ‘candy-ass, ridiculous, parasitic activity’.” (p 200)

July 2018; 261 pages

"The Dead Duke, his Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse" by Pie Marie Eatwell

The 5th Duke of Portland was a weird bloke. He hated being seen and lived a more or less invisible life, either at his London residence or at Welbeck Abbey, near Worksop. His hobby seemed to be to build a vast network of underground rooms and passages beneath the Abbey. He kept himself to himself and didn't seem to like women.

Thomas Charles Druce had no birth or baptismal certificate. Following a brief spell living in Bury St Edmunds as a 'linen draper' he disappeared for a while and then reappeared as a department store owner. He had three illegitimate children, then he married their mother and had another three legitimate children before he died in 1864.

In 1898 the widow of his eldest legitimate son claimed that Druce was actually the alter ego of the 4th Duke, that the burial was a sham, that the grave was empty, and that therefore her son was the rightful heir of the Portland Estate. She applied to have the grave opened to see if there was indeed a body in it. But the Duke, and Druce's eldest (illegitimate) son who had inherited his father's money (but could not inherit any title) blocked the move.

The court case dragged on for years.

This superbly written book takes us through the dimensions of this mystery. Eatwell delves into and dissects the claims, counter-claims, perjuries and hidden truths. Some aspects are really spooky and she brings the tension out. She answers questions: why did Druce not marry his wife until after the first three children were born. Some questions she cannot answer: what did Druce do when he disappeared, why is their no record of his birth, who was he? But the excitement continues to the end.

A brilliant, weird, true life page-turner. October 2015; 300 pages

"The Croydon Arsenic Mystery" by Diane Janes

On 5th March 1929, in South Croydon, Violet Sidney died. Analysis of her remains suggested arsenic poisoning. Given that her daughter, Vera, had died a few months before and her other daughter Grace's husband shortly before that, their corpses were exhumed and found to contain arsenic. The suspects included the cook, the doctor (who was rumoured to fancy the widowed Grace), the Grace herself, and the son, Tom. It was a classic middle class murder mystery.

But was it? Although eminent forensic scientist Sir Bernard Spilsbury convinced the coroner that arsenic was involved in all three deaths and although Inspector Hedges, the local flat foot, was convinced of Grace's guilt, the police never prosecuted anyone.

Ms Janes follows the twists and turns of this case, through three inquests which sometimes threatened to slip from the coroner's control, through the brow-beating of suspects in a scarily biassed investigation, and through details of a forensic science that was still in its infancy. She castigates the police and the expert witnesses as asserting much much more than they could possibly prove, she shows how one of the analysts added his numbers up wrongly in a document that was provided to the court and never challenged, and she suggests her own unique solution.

She is certainly thorough. This is rather at the expense of clarity. There were so many assertions and challenges during the inquests, which were interleaved in time, that it becomes extremely confusing for the general reader. Much of the first two thirds of the book is devoted to a narrative reconstructing these details. But the book itself only comes alive when she shows how the evidence is flawed and when she looks at each death separately from a more modern perspective. When she sweeps aside the irrelevancies of description, the solutions she proposes become highly probable.

If she had restricted herself to the explanation part of the book it might have been a lot shorter but it would have been a great deal better. October 2015; 195 pages

"Satan's Circus" by Mike Dash

Satan's Circus was the nickname for an area of Manhattan just west of Broadway where gambling dens and brothels flourished in the years leading up to the First World War. Local politicians and the policemen they appointed ran protection rackets which grew fat on the ill-gotten gains of these businesses. Corruption was rife and to be a 'grafter' didn't mean you worked hard, it meant you took bribes.

Herman Rosenthal was a small time crook who ran remarkably unsuccessful illegal gambling dens. Convinced that his long run of bad luck came from his rivals tipping off the police, he decided to blow the whistle and contacted a journalist. His associates attempted to bribe him to leave town but when he refused they became convinced they would have to silence him more permanently. Despite realising he was being followed and being considerably frightened, he persisted and spilled the beans in two long newspaper articles. Shortly afterwards he was gunned down outside a hotel by four gunmen who escaped on the running board of their getaway taxi. The taxi was soon discovered and the men captured. It was then a matter of finding out who was Mr Big behind the plan by the time-honoured American way of offering immunity to some in order to persuade them to testify against their confederates. In this way the District Attorney constructed a case against a corrupt cop called Charley Becker. With the help of a remarkably biassed trial judge and despite a strong of unconvincing witnesses (including the memorable Bald Jack Rose who was completely hairless and had a face that was exactly like that of a vampire), and despite a successful appeal leading to a retrial, another conviction and a second, unsuccessful appeal, Becker died in the electric chair.

This is an exciting, if squalid story. The author does his best with a large cast of characters but it is not always easy to follow who did what (the murder was carried out by four gunmen, at least four other criminals were involved in organising it, there was also the taxi driver and the taxi owner, there were a strong of other related criminals and then there are the police and the lawyers and all the families of all the men). There are some wonderful nicknames (eg Gyp the Blood) and it certainly served as the inspiration for at least some of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls although this was the era just before prohibition and the rise of the famous New York gangsters such as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schulz.

The epilogue traces the subsequent careers of the low lifes mentioned on these pages. Arnold Rothstein (who was celebrated in fiction as The Brain in Guys and Dolls and Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby) was the man who fixed the 1919 World Baseball Series; he was shot dead in 1928. Winfield Sheehan who may have been involved with a corrupt Gambling Commission for Tammany Hall became a movie producer and discovered Rita Hayworth and John Wayne. And Charlie Becker's son became a professor of Sociology.

This was a fascinating book, lifting the lid on an underworld whilst managing to remind us always of the precarious and seedy existences the criminals led. The conviction of the policeman was clearly a travesty of justice but on the other hand he had accumulated a remarkable amount of graft in a very short time so he wasn't a nice man. Nevertheless, the description of his electrocution is horrendous.

Great reading. October 2015; 354 pages

"Did she kill him? by Kate Colquhon

This is the story of Florence Maybrick, a young American married to James, an older man who is a merchant in Liverpool. Tensions lurk behind their solid Victorian middle-class front, in their house containing a cook, maids and a nanny for their two children. James has a mistress and Florence is flirting with another man. And then, after a short illness, James dies.

His brothers are convinced that he has been poisoned by Florence and suggest this to the doctors. Slowly, the cumbersome machinery of Victorian detection and justice swings into action.

The house is littered with Arsenic in many forms, chiefly as patent medicines. Did Florence use them to remove herself of a husband who was beginning to turn violent or did James poison himself through his hypochondria and an addiction to arsenic? Did he even die from arsenic or was it simply gastro-enteritis? Nothing in this case is what it seems.

What is particularly brilliant about the narration of this case is that Colquhon never tells you what is going to happen before it happens. At each stage of the case there is doubt about what will happen next. Did she do it? Will she get off? Slowly, inexorably, the story unfolds. It is as good as any thriller. The only way it is marred is when Colquhon spends rather too long judging the social circumstances by repeated reference to Victorian novels, especially to those of Henry James.

Otherwise a brilliant real-life whodunnit.

August 2015; 346 pages

Kate Colquhon also wrote the desperately exciting Mr Briggs' Hat about the first railway murder in Britain.

"Dead Reckoning" by Caitlin Rother

True crime: in a plan masterminded by his wife Jennifer, ex-child actor Skylar Deleon and two accomplices board a boat, force the retired couple who own and sail it to give them power of attorney over all their assets, and then tie them to the anchor and dump them overboard.

This is a classic of American journalism. Obsessive about detailing every single character in the drama, we know the religious convictions of the detectives and the military background of the judge. I adore this sort of reportage. My favourite example is probably All the President's Men, the Bernstein and Woodward classic about Watergate, in which we learn what the reporters eat when they meet with the owner of the Washington Post. This captures a real flavour of my (probably inaccurate) perspective of what it is to be a citizen of the USA: churches and food and money and health and things and things and things.

And this does seem scary. Life in the beautiful state of California does seem to be a perpetual struggle. Honest people seem to work so hard (often at more than one job) for very little pay. Medical bills can easily tip them over the edge. Skylar and Jennifer wanted the good life so they rapidly ran up credit card bills and took out loans from banks and family members which they had no hope whatsoever of repaying. At the same time, it was easy to earn tens of thousands of dollars from drugs or by persuading the gullible to part with inheritances and savings as 'investments' (and then to kill them.

And violence is never very far away. When Skylar needs some muscle for his murderous plot he arranges it through a contact. He meets the muscle (a gang member bizarrely named John F Kennedy who is studying to become a pastor) in a car park and persuades him there and then to join in. The man gets $1300. The notary who illegally notarizes the power of attorneys gets more (she is a sad case of a woman who knows she is doing something dodgy but is tempted by the bucks well over her head).

When you think about it, this is a deeply disturbing portrait of a society in which a prosperous elite is perpetually threatened by a dysfunctional underclass.

Most of these criminals are weak and stupid. Alonso is a poorly paid prison guard who falls under the influence of Skylar. He then vacillates between working all hours for good money and working long hours for poor money. Finally he joins Skylar on the boat on the fateful day. Sickened by what has happened, he runs away to Mexico but then voluntarily returns to testify, for which he gets a reduced sentence of twenty years.

But you cannot believe that Skylar and Jennifer ever thought they would get away with the crime. They used their cell phones to talk to one another throughout the day and the cell phone masts tracked where Skylar was. The power of attorney plan was botched and almost deliberately designed to throw suspicion on these two to whom, apparently, the victims had given complete control over their finances.

Incredible! But a rattling good read. January 2015; 474 pages

"The Policeman and the brothel" by Theodore Dalrymple

In Victorian Jersey the amateur police force had to deal with a cluster of 3 murders in 3 months, the last being the fatal stabbing of a volunteer policeman by a brothel 'madam'. Dalrymple probes into this crime wave.

Except this is scarcely forensic history. rather, these events provide a springboard for Dalrymple to muse, somewhat at random, about the efficacy of the death penalty, police corruption then and now, morality and the press, and whatever else takes his fancy.

What else is he to do? There is no mystery about the crimes, no element of 'who really dunnit?'. The culprits are obvious. There is some investigation as to whether one of the murderers was insane within the meaning of the law but little else. There is an attempt, eventually, to trace what happened to those transported for life. But there is not enough material here to base a book. It should have been a pamphlet. Instead, Dalrymple pads it out with his political views. He also quotes newspaper articles verbatim and court transcripts verbatim to give himself many extra pages.

The book should have been (less than) half the length.

July 2014; 215 pages

"The Peculiar case of the Electric Constable" by Carol Baxter

John Tawell was a wannabe Quaker who had been transported to Sydney for forgery, made his fortune, and returned to become a respectable citizen. Except he had a mistress and two illegitimate children whom he kept at Salt Hill near Slough. When she died horribly, shortly after he was seen to leave her house, he was arrested for murder (thanks to the new invention of the telegraph which could travel faster than the train from Slough to Paddington). This is the tale of the investigation and trial.

It is brilliantly written. Baxter uses all the original source material and then reconstructs them into a narrative. After the initial excitement of the crime and the chase she dives back into Tawell's life and the original crime which led to transportation. We find out about conditions in New South Wales during the convict era. Then we follow the investigation and the details of toxicology tests in the earliest days of forensic science. There follows a courtroom drama. Baxter writes fluently and with clarity and the pace never stops.

A great example of the genre. June 2014; 349 pages

"The Curious Habits of Doctor Adams" by Jane Robins

Four star: potentially my favourite true crime book of 2014; definitely will be on the short list.

John Bodkin Adams practised medicine in Eastbourne; he was particularly solicitous of old ladies. Many of them died under his care, often after he had prescribed for them huge amounts of morphine, heroin and barbiturates. Many left him money or possessions; he liked posh cars and he was particularly greedy and avaricious for 'mementoes' such as gold pencils that he picked up even while the patient was still alive. 42% of those died of 'cerebral thrombosis' according to his death certificates (three times the expected average of about 14%). Was he a mass murderer?

Jane Robins presents the evidence and charts the history of the police investigation, at the end of which we are left in little doubt that he was guilty. Then she describes the trial and new evidence comes to light. Was Adams killing for gain or was it euthanasia? Or was he simply trying to ease suffering without properly calculating that the effect of his treatment might be to shorten life?

This is a true crime as exciting as any whodunnit and the final result is in doubt until almost the very end.

Riveting. January 2014; 284 pages