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A review by lee_hillshire
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders
"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.
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.