One of the downsides (sort of) going to the local AMC weekly is that it’s located in the local mall, and across the mall from the multiplex is a Barnes and Noble. And, given I am already there, I tend to buy books I don’t have time to read before or after a given movie. You know, when the place isn’t closed for a pandemic.
Point is, I was buying books in there before or after a movie a couple months ago when one book caught my eye with the title alone: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by one Judith Flanders. Now, I try not to buy books based just on a title, but this one was intriguing enough that I added it to my stack that day.
Flanders’s work, a piece of nonfiction, covers most of the 19th century in England, and chronicles how the country became obsessed with certain murders over the course of the century. Now, not every case Flanders covers was necessarily a murder. 19th century forensics, combining with public prejudices against groups like the poor, working class, the Irish, the Jewish, and so forth, often created crimes where there may not have been one. The point is that sometimes violent crimes happened, and as the book starts, Flanders shows the weaknesses in the police departments of that era, namely that they didn’t really have any, or they were differing groups with different duties and criminal investigation wasn’t high on their list of priorities. However, with newspapers and broadsides and public pressure being what it was, there were plenty of changes made.
Much of Fletcher’s book covers certain patterns. A suspicious death would occur that caught the imagination of the press and the public. The crime, real or possibly imagined, is covered with all pertinent details from the discovery of the corpse through to the conviction and execution that often follows. From there, the book covers the sensation of the crime, how it was reflected in newspapers, cheap novels, and even the works of authors still read today–Fletcher points out Dickens was basically a crime writer–and even odder things that happened as a result of the crime. Apparently, numerous greyhounds, racehorses, and private boats were named for convicted murderers. And, once in a while, for victims.
And along the way, modern police departments and forensics work evolved. Sure, it wasn’t smooth, and plenty of judges and doctors made calls based on their personal prejudices as opposed to any real evidence, and this was a time when apparently neighborhood gossip was enough to get a person executed.
Fletcher uses her last chapter to cover one big unsolved crime, namely the Jack the Ripper case, and aside from the fact the Ripper was neither caught nor convicted, that didn’t stop the fascination, and the end result was that much of what we see today, whenever the likes of an OJ Simpson or a Casey Anthony suddenly make national news for what may be more of a local crime, we can probably trace such interest and even hysteria in some cases back to this time period. This was the time that not only gave us the Ripper, but also Sherlock Holmes and Scotland Yard. Fletcher’s work does a fairly good job of chronicling this period of time and the way the society evolved to become what it is today in many ways. People interested in true crime or social histories would probably get a lot of a work like this.
Grade: B
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