A Very British Murder

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Worsley pinpoints how crime was handled and the limitations of the investigators trying to solve the crimes.

A very British murder : the story of a national obsession

In 2011, Worsley presented the four-part television series If Walls Could Talk, exploring the history of British homes, from peasants' cottages to palaces; and the three-part series Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency. Speaking of James Bond, let me clarify that although Worsley makes it sound as if James Bond came along in 1939, obviously she doesn't mean that because later in the book she refers to his first appearing in 1952 (except wasn't it 1953? W. Hornung, the creator of the gentleman thief, Raffles, was the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Its an absorbing read and it does exactly that and there is no doubt that crime as a art in fiction will long live on and as she ends, it is possible that 'a historian of the future will probably turn, not to blue books and statistics, but to detective stories'.This documentary takes a look at some of the most horrible and despicable murders in modern British history. The Golden Age doesn't seem to have been all about artificial and superficial village cozies until the time Hitler launched the German attack on Poland. But her real interest – reminiscient of the line taken by Judith Flanders in her 2010 book The Invention of Murder – lies in the way murder was portrayed in the emerging media, and how the public responded to depictions of fatal crimes.

A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession

Yet the years following WW1 also saw the flowering of horror and supernatural literature, as well as highly visceral and lurid thrillers by Edgar Wallace, Sapper, Sax Rohmer and many others. Lucy Worsley has set out to trace the roots of the British obsession with murder – as consumers, rather than participants. And there are still plenty of police procedurals that at heart are the descendants of the Golden Age, where clues and character are still more important than blood-soaked scenes of violence and torture.In April 2016, Worsley published her debut children's novel, Eliza Rose, about a young noble girl in a Tudor Court. I discovered that she had written a book titled Jane Austen at Home, a biography that highlighted Austen’s writing from the context of the various homes in which she had once resided or visited. The subject matter itself is not groundbreaking or perspective-changing but interesting nevertheless if you have a fondness for detective fiction as I do. She makes the case that the fascination with murder corresponded to the increasing urbanisation of Britain during the nineteenth century which, because neighbours no longer knew each other as they had done in a more rural age, meant that murders could be much harder to detect. The author's theme is that the British came to 'consume' the subject of murder for entertainment, initially in cheap broadsheets, and later on in Penny Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls, cheap forerunners of the paperback of the 20th century.