![]() ![]() ![]() There’s the contemporary criminal, Edward Oxford, who took a couple of pot shots at Queen Victoria and the aforementioned Prince Albert. With a crime this old, the mists of time can obscure a lot of detail, leading to as much conjecture as hard fact, but author Claire Harman makes the narrative absorbing with related threads in the complicated, often surprising Victorian tapestry. Lacking forensic science, the forces of justice more crudely rely on mysteriously appearing evidence and contradictory confessions. The investigation itself is no Holmesian triumph, either. ![]() The solution of the case is not really the story here, and the culprit, unlike most fictional mysteries, is the most obvious person. Forget the miserable and dangerous lives of the poor, when an aristocrat got murdered, the new consort, Prince Albert, and the old general, the Duke of Wellington, wanted to see the matter cleared up as soon as possible. ![]() London in 1840 was a pretty grim place, but the reason this crime became a veritable national sensation didn’t have much to do with the gore of the thing or the apparent brazenness of it, but the simple fact that it happened to a member of the uppermost crust, Lord William Russell. Like many True Crime books, Murder by the Book starts with a bloody crime, a man with his throat cut in his own bed. ![]()
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