Customer Reviews

The Country House Murders

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I quite like historial crime cases which is why I picked up this book but the book is very uneven. Each chapter is written by someone different and the whole has been edited by John Goodman - but I flatly disliked some of the authors in this.

The worst was the first chapter, "The Killing at Road Hill House" - I almost stopped reading the whole book after that However reading on I was gripped by "The Puzzle of Rumsey House" and really enjoyed the "The Origin of the 'Gigman' ". After that I just skipped the chapters that didn't take me in the first few paragraphs

Most of the cases were new to me. Goodman also collects them up from a range of times and places - the earliest was the death of Amy Robsart, wife of the Earl of Leciester in the 16th Century. The rest were mostly spread from 1800 to the late 1950's. Mostly English cases there were also a couple of French ones and an American case (The Frozen Footprints). I hadn't come across any of the cases before except that of "The Gigman" which is the infamous Hunt-Thurtell murder trial of the 1820's which has been made into a book.

Jonathon Goodman writes the most interesting (I think) case in the book called "A short walk to Eternity" about a certain William Corder who murders his mistress - Goodman writes with a nice dry tone but I just felt there was detail about the Corder not really explained. Perhaps I am being unfair and there isn't room in this short book. Perhaps we never really understand murderers. It wasn't so much his murder, but his life afterwards that seemed so inexplicable.

I see from the front page that Goodman has edited a number of other of these True Crime collections. If I came across them I would certainly browse through them but I don't think I would actively seek them out to read.