A Very British Murder

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Lucy Worsley (7 September 2013). "AVeryBritishMurder". The Independent. BBC Books . Retrieved 9 October 2015. James shares Symons' view that modern crime fiction is clearly superior to Golden Age detective fiction, though she is more favorable than Symons to the Crime Queens Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh (on the other hand, Symons is more favorable to Agatha Christie).

Lucy Worsley — Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2 Lucy Worsley — Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2

The latest book by popular historian and British television presenter Lucy Worsley is A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession (2013), which details, in about 80, 000 words, Britain's remarkable fascination with murder in fact and fiction since around 1800 into the mid-twentieth century. It is the companion volume to a 2013 three-part British television program. Worsley began her career as a historic house curator at MiltonManor, [4] near Abingdon, in the summer of 1995, [5] before working for the SocietyfortheProtectionofAncientBuildings. From 1996 to 2002, she was an inspector of historic buildings for EnglishHeritage in the East Midlands region. During that time, she studied the life of WilliamCavendish,1stDukeofNewcastle and wrote the English Heritage guide to his home, BolsoverCastle. In 2001, she was awarded a DPhil degree from the UniversityofSussex for a thesis on The Architectural Patronage of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, 1593–1676. [6] The thesis was later developed into Worsley's book Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses published in 2007. [7]Snobbery with Violence and The Dangerous Edge of Things (on the decline of the Golden Age detective novel) A very early contribution was 'The Adventures of Susan Hopley, or Circumstantial Evidence' of 1841 in which the heroine solves a murder and then there was 'The Female Detective' and 'Revelations of a Female Detective' by Andrew Forrester and WS Hayward, both books starring a professional heroine who was employed purely to solve crimes. The public interest in murder was at its height and they devoured such offerings. Lucy Worsley looks at murder through the eyes of writers in fiction and fact through the ages, beginning with comments on Thomas de Quincey's essay 'On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts' that was inspired by the so-called Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811. This multiple murder saw the beginning of the gruesome correlation between lurid reporting of a crime that sparked a massive increase in the sales of newspapers and thus engendered the interest of the public. Relying mostly on James and Symons ( Colin Watson's chestnut Snobbery with Violence, 1971gets tapped too), Worsley has produced an account of the Golden Age that to me is often unsatisfactory. 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.

A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession by

It turns out that what the lower middle and working classes most wanted to do, in their leisure time, was to come face-to-face with murderers. And if that wasn’t possible, they wanted to read about them.” In 2019, Worsley presented American History's Biggest Fibs, looking at the nation's founding story and American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Cold War.

Worsley has published a number of books, many guides to houses and the like. Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (2011) is her most recent work on history. In 2014, BBCBooks published her book, A Very British Murder, which was based on the series. [23] Owen, Pamela (22 September 2013). "AVeryBritishMurder:Howwebecamehookedonmorbidmysteries". The Mirror . Retrieved 24 September 2013. I also love my Brit-Box-(Worsely has a television version of this book currently airing on this service) and Acorn TV subscriptions too. Great crime series- from dark and gritty to light and cozy. It also touches on the origins and evolution of the police and more specifically the emergence of the detective.