Author Who Outsold Dickens… Stephen Carver’s “Author Who Outsold Dickens” (2020): Biography of a Crime Novelist 23 Mar 202023 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo When I was doing my MA dissertation on the cultural history of crime, my supervisor, Dr Heather Shore, advised me to read two now largely forgotten novels:…
17th century… “The Truth and Nothing But the Truth”: Its first use in popular culture 20 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo ‘The truth and nothing but the truth’—it’s a well-known phrase used in courts of law and most of us have probably heard it in some police procedural…
16th Century… Gamaliel Ratsey (d.1605): The Man whose Life Kick-started the “True Crime” Genre 18 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo Gamaliel Ratsey was born in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire, during the late sixteenth century.[1] Little is known of Ratsey’s early life; his father, Richard, and his wife had…
17th century… Claude Du Vall: The Ladies’ Highwayman 21 Feb 2020 By Stephen Basdeo In 1671 the poet and satirist wrote an ode ‘To the Memory of the Most Renowned Du-Vall’.[1] It celebrated the bravery and heroism of an English highwaymen…
1950s… Perverts in Rubber Suits 16 Oct 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Such a man begins to commit actual murder from the first moment that he begins to indulge his sadistic day dreams, from the instant that he deviates…
1950s… Red Katy and her Customers 2 Oct 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Robert Fabian (1901–1978) began his career as a police constable in London. He rose through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police and was eventually appointed to the…
