Liverpool Murders

A look at the dark side of life in Liverpool in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology rolls out the red carpet for the stories that Hollywood is made of. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. Lights! Camera! Action! The latest book in the Big Book series takes us behind the curtain to uncover the stories that became some of the greatest films of the silver screen. There's the W. Somerset Maugham short story that inspired Hitchcock's Secret Agent; Robert Louis Stevenson's horrifying tale that was later turned into the iconic movie The Body Snatcher, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; Sir Ian Fleming's "From a View to a Kill," later one of Roger Moore's greatest Bond films; and "Cyclists' Raid," the short story that formed the basis for the legendary Brando film The Wild One. Otto Penzler delivers the director's cut on these classic short stories and the films they gave rise to. So grab your Sno-Caps and a jumbo box of popcorn and curl up with these cinematic tales from the likes of Agatha Christie, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Dashiell Hammett, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Some of the gruesome cases in this book are better known than others, such as the inexplicable shooting of his wife and two daughters by Lock Ah Tam in 1926 and the Gorse Hall murder in 1909, which still excites afictionados of true crime and those who like a good unsolved mystery. Others are less well known, including the mysterious murder of Mary Malpas in 1835 and the crime of Frederick George Wood in Bramhall in 1922, a classic example of the pointless murder, for little or no reward, while few outside the town have ever heard the tale of the 'Congleton Cannibal.' All manner of murder and mystery is featured here, and this book is sure to be a must-read for true crime enthusiasts everywhere.

Vivid and intriguing, Murder Maps plots the nineteenth century’s most dramatic murders from around the world onto meticulous diagrams and period maps, and recounts the brilliant detective work that solved the cases. Elegant period maps and compelling crime analysis illuminate this disquieting volume, which reexamines the most captivating and intriguing homicides of the nineteenth century. Organized geographically, the elements of each murder—from the prior movements of both killer and victim to the eventual location of the body—are meticulously replotted using archival maps and bespoke plans, taking readers on a perilous journey around the murder hot spots of the world. From the “French Ripper,” Joseph Vacher, who roamed the French countryside brutally mutilating and murdering at least eleven people, to H. H. Holmes and his “Murder Castle” in Chicago, crime expert Dr. Drew Gray recounts the details of each case. His forensic examination uncovers both the horrifying details of the crimes themselves and the ingenious detective work that led to the capture of the murderers. Throughout the book, Gray highlights the development of police methods and technology, from the introduction of the police whistle to the standardization of the mug shot to the use of fingerprinting and radiotelegraphy in apprehending criminals. Vividly recreating over one hundred individual murder cases through historic maps, photographs, newspaper excerpts, court papers, and police reports, Murder Maps is perfect for everyone interested in criminal history, forensics, or the macabre.

On the morning of 7 March 1997, the bodies of two elderly female patients were discovered in their sheltered accommodation at Grangegorman Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin.It would be a further 16 years before Mark Nash was convicted of the notorious Grangegorman murders, but not before Dean Lyons, an innocent man, spent months in prison for a crime he did not commit, only to tragically die of a heroin overdose before his name was cleared. Here Alan Bailey, a retired member of the Garda Síochána who worked on the original case and who always insisted Lyons was innocent, recalls the investigation of the most brutal murders in Irish criminal history, and how pressure on the Garda Síochána to solve the crime led to one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the history of the Irish state.