Dorothy Sayers called William Roughead "the best showman who ever stood before the door of the chamber of horrors," and his true crime stories, written in the early 1900s, are among the glories of the genre. Displaying a meticulous command of evidence and unerring dramatic flair, Roughead brings to life some of the most notorious crimes and extraordinary trials of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Scotland. Utterly engrossing, these accounts of pre-meditated mayhem and miscarried justice also cast a powerful light on the evil that human beings, and human institutions, find both tempting to contemplate and all too easy to do.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 08/31/2000
ISBN: 9780940322462
Pages: 576
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 7.96h x 5.00w x 1.58d

Review Citations: Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2001 pg. 118