Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder on BBC Radio 4.

BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week is offering readings of Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. I reviewed the book here for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Of related interest: Readings are starting of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (on the Constance Kent case).

The Road Murder this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

BBC Radio 7 has become BBC Radio 4 Extra; featured this week is Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher on the 1860 Road Murder. Also on the air: Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe in Bones and Silence. Go here for the schedule; episodes can generally be heard online for a week after broadcast.

UK's National Archives on the Constance Kent case.

Rendering of Constance
Kent, Alden's Illustrated
Family Miscellany,
Aug 1865

In this podcast from the UK's National Archives, Sarah Hutton discusses the documents in the archives pertaining to the Constance Kent case of 1860, most recently covered in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008). Kent confessed to killing her half-brother, Francis Saville Kent, and served 20 years in prison.

Friday's Forgotten Books: F. Tennyson Jesse's Murder and Its Motives (1924).

Most criminals are great egoists and inordinately vain, but these two qualities are found to excess in murderers.
—F. Tennyson Jesse, Murder and Its Motives 11

In Murder and Its Motives F. Tennyson Jesse classifies murders into six categories (murder for gain, murder for revenge, murder for elimination, murder for jealousy, murder for the lust of killing, and murder from conviction). She then provides case studies by type: William Palmer (murder for gain, some 15 murders, 1850s), Constance Kent (murder for revenge, 1860; most recently covered in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher), the Querangals (murder for elimination, brother and sister disposal of spouses, 1881), Mary Eleanor Wheeler (murder for jealousy, killing of her lover's spouse and baby, 1890), Neill Cream (murder for lust of killing, numerous killings, 1892), and Orsini (murder for conviction, tried for an attempt on Emperor Napoleon III, 1858).

This lucid and perceptive book is a must for anyone who wishes to construct convincing criminals in their fiction. Sadly, it is out of print. The 1952 edition is dedicated to three people, one of whom is Algonquin Round Table member Alexander Woollcott.

F. Tennyson Jesse, from
the Bookman, June 1914

World War I correspondent, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist F. Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958), the great-niece of Alfred Lord Tennyson, is probably best known for her books in the Notable British Trials series such as that on Madeleine Smith (the subject of David Lean's film Madeleine, 1949) and A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), which was based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder case. Her work and troubled life are discussed in A Portrait of Fryn: A Biography of F. Tennyson Jesse (1984) by Joanna Colenbrander, Jesse's secretary.

TLS: Judith Flanders on authors of the first female detectives.

In the June 18 Times Literary Supplement, British novelist and journalist Judith Flanders discusses the first known female fictional detectives, particularly those pertaining to Experiences of a Lady Detective (aka Revelations of a Lady Detective, 1884; attributed to W. S. Hayward, but there is controversy about that); accounts based on the Constance Kent case (most recently the subject of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher); and a convincing unmasking of the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester Jr. (The Female Detective, ca. 1863). Unfortunately, Flanders's piece only appears to be available in the TLS print edition. Clues 25.1 (2006) and 26.3 (2008) featured articles that discussed Victorian female sleuths; the author of one, Dagni Bredesen of Eastern Illinois University, is working on scholarly editions of The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Also of interest in the June 18th TLS: Michael Dirda's recollections as an assistant editor of the Washington Post Book World: "Elmore Leonard confessed that he was tired of being asked to review gritty crime novels, so I talked him into writing about the latest Anita Brookner" (16). Readers might also peruse Jonathan Barnes's June 23rd discussion (available online) of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Creeping Man" (1923), in the context of a review for the 56-volume The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Update: Bredesen's scholarly edition of The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective has been published under the title The First Female Detectives.

About the image: The Mutiny of the Thunder (1878) by W. S. Hayward, one of the authors discussed in Judith Flanders's June 18th TLS article.