The Drowned City, the first in KJ Maitland’s Daniel Pursglove series of historical crime novels, is set in Bristol in 1606 – a year after the Gunpowder Plot – where a Jesuit conspirator is said to be hiding. KJ Maitland tells Historia how religious conflict caused an increase in people-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean England. […]
Bigger than Profumo! ‘The scandal that history forgot’
In the mid-1960s the Conservative Party was still recovering from the Profumo affair when a new scandal was uncovered… and quickly covered up again, with the help of some unexpected allies. Historian Daniel Smith, author of The Peer and the Gangster, tells Historia how the story was quickly and conveniently ‘forgotten’. There was a peer, […]
The Peer and the Gangster: A Very British Cover-up by Daniel Smith
In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined: Peer and a Gangster: Yard Enquiry. While the article withheld the names of the subjects, the newspaper reported that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had ordered an investigation into an alleged homosexual relationship between ‘a household name’ from the House of Lords and […]
The King’s Evil by Andrew Taylor
London 1667. In the Court of Charles II, it’s a dangerous time to be alive – a wrong move may lead to disgrace, exile or death. The discovery of a body at Clarendon House, the palatial home of one of the highest courtiers in the land, could therefore have catastrophic consequences. James Marwood, a traitor’s […]
The Conviction of Cora Burns by Carolyn Kirby
Birmingham, 1885. Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her. Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood. Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to […]
‘Paedo Hunter Turns Prey!’ The ironic fate of the father of tabloid journalism
In the past few years, amateur paedophile hunters have rarely been far from the headlines of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, writes author Carolyn Kirby. “The nation is in the grip of an extraordinary phenomenon involving possibly thousands of have-a-go investigators,” said the Daily Mail in June last year. Sometimes caught on the wrong side of the […]
Review: The Fire Court by Andrew Taylor
“All lines converged on the Dragon Yard case and the Fire Court at Clifford’s Inn.” But in Andrew Taylor’s second book in the James Marwood and Cat Lovett series, set in London just after the Great Fire, those lines tangle and twist fiendishly before coming together, writes Frances Owen. It’s 1667. James Marwood, son of […]
Crime and Punishment under Henry II
E.M. Powell on how Henry II laid the foundations of English Common Law. King Henry II of England is best known in the popular imagination for the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket, a murder for which the King was blamed. Four knights broke into Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 and slew Becket in the most […]