Did you know that many of Agatha Christie’s best-selling detective stories have their basis in reality?‘Who killed Charles Bravo and why?’ asks retired Superintendent Spence in Elephants Can Remember. He refers to an unsolved Victorian murder mystery, one of many allusions to real life crime and criminals in Agatha Christie’s fiction. The infamous Dr Crippen, Jack the Ripper, John George Haigh, and many other real killers, fraudsters and spies, figure prominently in her plots, both...

The East End is one of the most famous parts of London and it has had its own distinctive identity since the district was first settled in medieval times. It is best known for extremes of poverty and deprivation, for strong political and social movements, and for the extraordinary mix of immigrants who have shaped its history. Jonathan Oatess handbook is the ideal guide to its complex, rich and varied story and it is an essential source for anyone who wants to find out about an East End an...

An historical true crime accounting of London's notorious serial murderers and their victims, spanning the Victorian era to the mid-twentieth century.Murders and murderers fascinate us—and perhaps serial killers fascinate us most of all. In the twentieth century the term came to be used to describe murders committed by the same person, often with similar methods. But, as Jonathan Oates demonstrates in this selection of cases from London, this category of crime has e...

This chilling volume brings together more murderous tales that shocked not only the county but made headline news throughout the nation. Covering the length and breadth of Buckinghamshire, the featured cases include the brutal slaying of a family of seven in Denham in 1870, the killing of a butcher's wife in Victorian Slough for which no one was ever found guilty, a double shooting at Little Kimble and a killing near Haddenham in 1828, in which a letter written a year late...

A simple guide to tracing British family tree before the onset of civil registration in 1837 and back to the Middle Ages.The trail that an ancestor leaves through the Victorian period and the twentieth century is relatively easy to follow—the records are plentiful, accessible, and commonly used. But how do you go back further, into the centuries before the central registration of births, marriages, and deaths was introduced in 1837, before the first detailed census ...

This west London town has its own character—and its own deadly criminal history—from the author of Unsolved Murders of Victorian and Edwardian London.Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths Around Uxbridge takes the reader on a sinister and sad journey through centuries of local crime and conspiracy, meeting victims and villains of all sorts along the way. There is no shortage of harrowing—and revealing—incidents of evil and despair to recount from the ear...

True stories of malice, perversion and despair that reveal the dark, sometimes lethal side of history in these two London boroughs.You may think Richmond, Kingston and the neighbouring districts are prosperous, safe and law-abiding in comparison to the hazardous, crime-prone centre of London, but you would be mistaken. For, as Jonathan Oates shows in this gripping book, appalling crimes have shocked the local community and left their mark on the history of the area...

In the quaint seaside town of Bude, Cornwall, a seemingly innocent afternoon tea in 1930 unravels into a sinister tale of arsenic poisoning and mysterious disappearances. When one of the three tea companions succumbs to the deadly toxin, suspicions arose, and the plot thickens as Annie Hearn, one of the remaining survivors, vanished without a trace. As the press dug into Annie's enigmatic past, unsettling stories emerged. In the backdrop of this gripping mystery, doctors grow wary of a pec...

Why does the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin have such an extraordinary reputation today? How come his criminal career has inspired a profusion of often misleading literature and film? This eighteenth-century villain is often portrayed as a hero – dashing, sinister, romantic, daring, a Robin Hood of his times. The reality, as Jonathan Oates reveals in this perceptive, carefully researched study, was radically different. He was a robber, torturer and killer, a gangster whose posthumous rep...

'Butcher' Cumberland is portrayed as one of the arch villains of British history. His leading role in the bloody defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 and his ruthless pursuit of Bonnie Prince Charlie's fugitive supporters across the Scottish Highlands has generated a reputation for severity that has endured to the present day. He has even been proposed as the most evil Briton of the eighteenth century. But was Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the younger son of George II, r...

"Oates charts train crimes from the Victorian period to the present day, from casual murder to calculated robbery. . . . A must for true-crime addicts" ( Practical Family History).Murder and robbery committed on the railways have long held a special place in British criminal history. Railways and trains create special conditions—and opportunities—for criminal acts. Two legendary large-scale robberies took place on the British railways—the Gold Bullion Robb...

In this practical handbook Jonathan Oates introduces the fascinating subject of criminal history and he gives readers all the information they need to investigate the life stories of criminals and their victims. He traces the development of the justice system and policing, and gives an insight into the criminal world of the times and the individuals who populated it. In a series of concise chapters he covers all the important aspects of the subject. At every stage, he guides readers toward...