1950s France. A British establishment figure. A shocking crime. A miscarriage of justice. The search for truth. In 1952, in a peaceful corner of Provence, a farmer’s son stumbled upon a terrible scene. Three bodies: a husband and wife shot dead, their ten-year-old daughter savagely beaten to death. They were all British. So begins one […]
The Men Who Were Sherlock Holmes by Daniel Smith
In 1893, young army officer Cecil Hambrough was murdered at the sprawling Ardlamont estate in Scotland, unleashing one of the most gripping court cases Victorian Britain had ever known. Even more remarkably, the case brought together two pioneering forensic experts – Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn – two men upon whom Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock […]
Felo de Se: the gruesome punishment that led to me writing The Low Road
Katharine Quarmby’s investigation into the gruesome burial of a suicide victim — for felo de se — with links to her home town inspired her first novel, The Low Road. For Women’s History Month, she explains why this punishment fell disproportionately onto poor women, and what made her want to tell this story. On a […]
Hawkhurst by Joseph Dragovich
In south-east England in the 1740s war and heated politics bring the old practice of smuggling to new and dangerous heights. Violent gangs of smugglers terrorise communities and confound government attempts to stop them. The most famous of these, the Hawkhurst Gang, operates like a modern drug cartel fuelled by illegal tea. They threaten witnesses […]
Mask wearing and crime in Renaissance Venice
The author Deborah Swift thought that setting her third Italian Renaissance novel in Venice during the Carnival would give her villain the ideal opportunity for disguise. But when she began her research she discovered that the association between mask wearing and crime in Venice was anything but straightforward. When I decided to set a novel […]
The scandalous Seymours
Adultery, incest, treason: there were several great families at the courts of the Tudors who excelled in these practices. The Boleyns and the Howards may spring to mind, but, as Alexandra Walsh explains, the scandalous Seymours were ahead of all the others. In a court bursting with intrigue, skulduggery and scandal, where friends could become […]
Scandal at Dolphin Square: A Notorious History by Daniel Smith and Simon Danczuk
Designed as a city dwelling for the modern age, Dolphin Square opened in London’s Pimlico in 1936. Boasting 1,250 high-tech flats, a swimming pool, restaurant, gardens and shopping arcade, the complex quickly attracted a long list of the affluent and influential. But behind its veneer of respectability, the Square has become one of the country’s […]
People-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean times
The Drowned City, the first in KJ Maitland’s Daniel Pursglove series of historical crime novels, is set in Bristol in 1606 – a year after the Gunpowder Plot – where a Jesuit conspirator is said to be hiding. KJ Maitland tells Historia how religious conflict caused an increase in people-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean England. […]