THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“Wonderful… [Flanders] shines in her readings of literary novels containing criminal and detective elements, such as Oliver Twist, Mary Barton and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but can be sharp and very funny about the vagaries of melodramatic and sensational plotting.” –Wall Street JournalIn this fascinating exploration of murder in the nineteenth century, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fictionMurder in Britain in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, transformed into novels, into broadsides and ballads, into theatre and melodrama and opera—even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts.
