Murder
The mother of all crimes
During the heatwave in the summer of 1895, the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lords Cricket Ground on 8 July…
Two gone girls
The plot of Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four begins in 1989, with the murder of Shoko, a seven-year-old girl. Fourteen years…
Recent crime fiction
All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress…
Graphic, bleak and misogynistic
If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler’s mother, seek out your old house and play ball…
Diced heart and a full-bodied red
Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term…
Who killed murder?
The mystery of violent crime’s dramatic decline
No hiding place
Technology has made murderers much easier to catch
The gangs of north London
Brutal, needless stabbings on our city streets will never cease until drugs are legalised
The making of a legend
For one week in July 2010, the aspiring spree killer Raoul Moat was the only news. ‘Aspiring’ because he didn’t…
An inconvenient truth
On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your…
Compliance order
Never a man tortured by self-doubt, Derren Brown introduced his latest special Pushed to the Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday) as…
Barometer
In with the new How the new year is being celebrated around the world. From 1 January… BRITAIN: Annual Investment…
A step too far
Captain Robert Nairac was a Grenadier Guards officer serving in Northern Ireland when on 14 May 1977 he was abducted…
Murder, he wrote
The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from…
Could I have prevented a Kray murder?
Could I have prevented a Kray murder?
Marvellous, murderous city
When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent…
Foaming with much blood
According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so,…
LA runs riot
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
The murderous gangs who run the world
Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test —…
Bringing Camus to book
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
Fighting fear with fear
‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…
A brave man takes a stand
Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit.…
Addicted to trouble
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
The first and last puzzle
One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration…
Cold cases warm up
‘And anything by Michael Connelly’ were the final words of advice from one of my best friends in discussing books…
