In the last part of the book, Worsley takes a look at some of the best crime fiction authors including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. In it was suggested that there was an increase in the murder rate around the end of the 18th century. I especially admired Worsley's elegant use of two essays - Thomas De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1827) and George Orwell's "Decline of the English Murder" (1946) - as the framing works between which her intellectual history unfolds.

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction but I was attracted to this because it came up as a book club choice just after I had enjoyed several Lucy Worsley documentaries. I haven't seen the TV programme/series on which this book was based, but can envisage it from the structure of this book and the general style in which it comes across. The chapters are short and well illustrated and you can dip in and out as you wish - a very good read. Worsley pinpoints how crime was handled and the limitations of the investigators trying to solve the crimes. Lucy looks at notorious killings from the time and explores the books, plays and songs they inspired.If you took out a policy on your life, you were also unwittingly giving your family a financial motive to bump you off.

In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria s lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. 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'. At a point during the birth of modern Britain, murder entered our national psyche, and it’s been a part of us ever since.Ture crime is used as a starting point to show the fascination and natural progression to creating fictional equivalents. I've been dipping in and out of this one as I like to do with Non Fiction and as a reader interested in true crime and indeed crime fiction this was a great little read. Here she shares its secrets and explores the history of this phenomenon in forensic detail, examining not only the crimes themselves but also how murder became a form of middle-class entertainment through novels, plays, artefacts and the press. Lucy Worsley touches on the hard-boiled elements of murder with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler before she concludes, 'All through writing this book I've been worried about being too flippant about murder.