Reviews

The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders

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kaylo88's review against another edition

dark informative slow-paced

2.0

I should have loved this book, it's topics—death, true crime, and history—should have resonated with me, but unfortunately, I found it to be quite dry and forgettable. The structure of the book, organised into case, trial, and media response, resulted in lengthy and repetitive chapters.

It was interesting to learn about how newspapers fabricated the truth and presented it as fact, a practice that still occurs to some extent today. Additionally, I have always been fascinated by penny dreadfuls so I enjoyed hearing more about them.

Regrettably, I struggled to connect with the author's writing style, which made it challenging for me to finish the book and I struggle to find anything more to say.

Content Warnings

lee_hillshire's review against another edition

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"How the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime fiction."

There. I fixed it for you.

So yeah, I found the book mostly disappointing. I've read several books lately that say they follow the rise of the way we view and interact with crime and examine it, but don't actually. And to be fair, the book kiiiiinda follows the way in which the Victorians interacted with crime and the development of that. But it's all mostly from a fictional context, and it's focused on the rise of crime/detective fiction, using the two main examples of Sherlock Holmes, and Charles Dickens' famous crime fictions as a framework.

And the argument could be made that how we interact with crime fiction and real crime is similar. But I want something to actually address and deal with that, and not hide behind fiction and the fantastically gory details of historical crimes. Crimes that may or may not be conflated fiction sometimes.

sofia_mains's review against another edition

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From what I can tell, this book is well researched & well written! However, I did not like the narrator of the edition I listened to. It felt like a dull & uninspired reading of a presentation. I found myself not listening more than I payed attention.

littlemisszuzu's review against another edition

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4.0

This was an “in between” book for me (one that I listened to for a bit in between other books). I found it fascinating. The speed with which they went from trial to execution (days not months or years) way back when is crazy! And being able to convict people on basically zero actual evidence. It was interesting to hear about the emergence of forensics and how police work evolved. I liked the reader on audible very much.