The book opens in 1811 with the famous Ratcliffe Highway murders in London and the public outcry that followed when it became evident that there was no mechanism to investigate such a terrible crime effectively. At a point during the birth of modern Britain, murder entered our national psyche, and it’s been a part of us ever since. Lucy Worsley is one of my favourite historians, she is always so enthusiastic and engaging, with a wonderful sense of humour and great insight. An entertaining, well-written and well-structured exploration of the interest in murder which has been prevalent in the British for the last couple of centuries.

Melodrama was beloved mainly by working class people, but the fascination with murder ascended up the social scale as the Victorian age progressed. We were becoming a much more humane society by then, and in fact had been thus since 1823, when the Judgement of Death Act reduced the number of capital crimes to those guilty of treason, murder or piracy.

Then investigates how after the First World War, the murder mystery novel reached a peak of popularity in the hands of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. Parts One and Two of Lucy Worsley's book ("How to Enjoy a Murder" and "Enter the Detective") cover much of the same material I do when teaching my graduate courses "The Gothic Tradition" and "Sherlock, Science, and Ratiocination. I also love my Brit-Box-(Worsely has a television version of this book currently airing on this service) and Acorn TV subscriptions too.

Since this book is about our obsession with crime (mostly true but also fictional), the emphasis here is not on the various cases. 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. Ever since the Ratcliffe Highway Murders caused a nation-wide panic in Regency England, the British have taken an almost ghoulish pleasure in 'a good murder'.

Our fascination with 'a good murder' -- from the Ratcliffe Highway Murders at the turn of the nineteenth century to Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters, hanged in 1922 for the murder of Edith's husband -- became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels, plays and films, puppet shows and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. m. on KPBS 2 - The series moves forward in time to the Victorian Age as Lucy Worsley explores how science and detection had an influence on the popular culture of murder. I had previously read about some of the celebrated cases covered - the murders on the Ratcliffe Highway and the Red Barn and the one which formed the subject of 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' - but the author also draws upon cases now less known, and describes the development of the police force and crime investigation. It is fair to say that this work does have some limitations; it is a little unfocused and tends to rely on the notorious and shocking, in a way which will probably have more impact on the screen than on the page.

There appeared both real and fictional detectives as new heroic figures in the battle against crime. He tried Dorothy L Sayers with 'The Nine Tailors', which did not help the situation because he began his critique with 'One of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field.Worsley is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics, including Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency (2011), Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls (2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (2014), A Very British Romance (2015), Lucy Worsley: Mozart’s London Odyssey (2016), and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016).

The narrative explains how and why the readers’s original delight in the gory even sordid murders gradually developed into a preference for the more genteel country house murder mystery. renowned historian Lucy Worsley unpicks our fascination with murder in forensic detail in this gripping true crime documentary on BBC Select. Dr Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, and other historic places. I enjoyed the book though there are some odd omissions, such as there being no mention of Edgar Alan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morge', during the discussion of what constituted the earliest detective fictional work. 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'.

She argues (as others have done) that the Golden Age puzzle with its fairly defined rules developed as a response to the horrors of WW1 and fed into a society that wanted something a bit cosier than the blood-curdling melodramas of the past. Best-remembered for his memoir ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, he was an improvident hack, down on his luck, who needed to produce some articles for ready money, and in 1827 he came up with one titled ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. Worsley's manner of citing the work of other authors of books on English murder, often Judith Flanders and P. From the start of the 19th century, a new form of entertainment developed that was based on the British obsession with death.