The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders

 

The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime 
Judith Flanders
2011 
3/5 stars

The author gives the account of many highly-publicized Victorian murders and her reasons for why these crimes caught the public's attention when other equally disturbing ones did not. She shows the newspaper articles, plays, and novels each crime inspired.  The book is highly (at times painfully) detailed, and was obviously well-researched.  

Unfortunately, the book is also formulaic, with Flanders treating each crime the same way (description, trial, public reaction), and then jumping right into the next one -- for more than 400 pages.  It is easy to read and understand, with lots of interesting facts, but overall it's presented in a dull manner that makes it hard to persevere.   

I do want to point out that given  the nature of the crimes, there are some gruesome descriptions and Flanders does not stint on the particulars.  This may be a problem for some readers; I was certainly uncomfortable many times.  True crime is not my interest -- Victorian history is.

The most problematic issue for me, though, was her treatment of the novels mentioned in her book.  

It seems obvious that the author should expect her audience to be those interested in Victorian history and literature. Those readers would most likely be familiar with the novels that are mentioned and may be a regular reader of this genre.  Despite this, Flanders spoils the plots of all the melodramas and sensational fiction she discusses.  

I have already read many of the books mentioned, but she still managed to ruin the sequel to the melodrama I'm currently reading (Charlotte's Inheritance by M.E. Braddon).   Two others that are on my to-be-read list were also spoiled before I could skim over the paragraph.  I'm not sure why the author felt the need to give all the plot details but it was a huge problem for me.

(On a side note, the author also appears to feel that Dickens was the only Victorian author of sensational fiction/melodrama that could be considered "literature", which bothered me as well, given it's so highly untrue.  )

I'm rating the book three stars for the obvious amount of work and research that went into it, but can't strongly recommend it as I didn't feel it left me enlightened about the era or that it proved the subtitle ("How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime") as promised.