The Maul and the Pear Tree
10 best books like The Maul and the Pear Tree (P.D. James): The Father of Forensics: The Groundbreaking Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and the Beginnings of Modern CSI, Forty Years of Murder, Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection, The Complete Jack the Ripper, The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV, Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders, The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes
| Author | Colin Evans |
| ISBN | 0425210073 |
Before there was CSI, there was one man who saw beyond the crime-and into the future of forensic science.
His name was Bernard Spilsbury-and, through his use of cutting-edge science, he single-handedly brought criminal investigations into the modern age. Starting out as a young, charismatic...
| Author | Keith Simpson |
| ISBN | 0586050388 |
'Find that whip and you've found your man.' Keith Simpson told the police, pointing to the diamond-pattern weave of the lash marks on the savagely mutilated body of Margery Gardner. The police found the whip in an attache case left in a railway cloakroom by Neville George Cleverly Heath.
Another...
Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection
In 44 B.C. a Roman doctor named Antistius performed the first autopsy recorded in history—on the corpse of murder victim Julius Caesar. However, not until the nineteenth century did the systematic application of scientific knowledge to crime detection seriously begin, so that the tiniest scrap...
| Author | Donald Rumbelow |
| ISBN | 0140173951 |
Few stories have fastened their claws so firmly into the public imagination as the notorious and gruesome Whitechapel Murders of 1888. They were responsible for one of the most evocative legends in English folk history - Jack the Ripper. Best of all - for the myth-makers, that is - he was never caught,...
| Author | Anne Somerset |
| ISBN | 0312330170 |
The Affair of the Poisons, as it became known, was an extraordinary episode that took place in France during the reign of Louis XIV. When poisoning and black magic became widespread, arrests followed. Suspects included those among the highest ranks of society. Many were tortured and numerous executions...
| Author | Susan Tyler Hitchcock |
| ISBN | 0393327531 |
After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous...
| Author | Gary M. Lavergne |
| ISBN | 1574410296 |
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower and committed what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history. He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. In addition to promoting...
The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
| Author | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| ISBN | 0425189007 |
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the legendary author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, didn't just dwell in the imaginary world of fictional crimes. He also got involved with two real-life criminal cases-and wrote about them.
Now, "The Case of George Ernest Thompson Edalji" and "The Case of Oscar Slater"...
| Author | Sarah Wise |
| ISBN | 0805078495 |
"A work of great skill and sympathy, a meditation on one of the sorrowful mysteries once to be found on the streets of London. For any student of the city and its secret life, it is indispensable reading."
-Peter Ackroyd, The Times (London)
Before his murder in 1831, the "Italian boy" was...
| Author | Mary S. Hartman |
| ISBN | 0486780473 |
This riveting combination of true crime and social history examines a dozen cases from the 1800s involving thirteen French and English women charged with murder. Each incident was a cause célèbre, and this mixture of scandal and scholarship offers illuminating details of backgrounds, deeds,...
The World's Most Bizarre Murders: True Stories That Will Shock and Amaze You
| Author | James Marrison |
| ISBN | 1844546675 |
From the stomach-churning to the truly bizarre, the details of some of history’s weirdest and most shocking murder cases are collected in this enthralling volume. The criminals covered here all perpetrated crimes with a peculiar twist, among them Enriqueta Marti, who kidnapped children then...
| Author | Andy Edmonds |
| ISBN | 0688080618 |
Organized Crime, goes Hollywood in this captivating mystery of the unsolved murder (or was it murder?) of well known comedic actress Thelma Todd. Author Andy Edmonds, does another outstanding job on this biography and true life crime. I felt as though I'd been transported back to 1930's Hollywood...
| Author | Michael Sims |
| ISBN | 0143105663 |
Take a trip back to a time when criminals armed themselves with wit rather than with guns, and the pinnacle of crime-fighting technology was represented by Sherlock Holmes's magnifying glass. Edited by award-winning author and editor Michael Sims, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime presents, for...
| Author | Michael Alpert |
| ISBN | 0582772907 |
A sensational story of murder, trial and public revenge influenced the great writers and commentators of the day. As much a book about London as the story of a murder books about London sell. Full of fascinating detail about mid-Victorian London in the vein of Peter Ackroyd social history at its best.
Features...
| Author | Alison Rattle |
| ISBN | 0233002243 |
See this lady? You would NOT want to lock horns with her. You certainly wouldn't give her your baby. But in the late nineteenth century, that's exactly what a lot of women did. Why? Because in an era when having a child out of wedlock was so severely frowned upon, Amelia Dyer took advantage of this. She advertised...
| Author | William Roughead |
| ISBN | 0940322463 |
Dorothy Sayers called William Roughead "the best showman who ever stood before the door of the chamber of horrors," and his true crime stories, written in the early 1900s, are among the glories of the genre. Displaying a meticulous command of evidence and unerring dramatic flair, Roughead brings to...
| Author | Jan Bondeson |
| ISBN | 0306811588 |
"The facts in this case are so bizarre that no novelist would have dared to invent them," said the Philadelphia Inquirer. Indeed. A century before Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London, another predator held sway: a "vulgar-looking man" who slashed at female pedestrians with a knife while uttering...
| Author | Sidney D. Kirkpatrick |
| ISBN | 0525243909 |
On February 1, 1922, the distinguished silent-film director William Desmond Taylor was shot to death in his Los Angeles bungalow by an unknown assailant. Reports of strange activities at the scene of the crime circulated soon after. When the police arrived, was the head of Paramount Studios burning...
Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain's First Railway Murder
| Author | Kate Colquhoun |
| ISBN | 1847443699 |
On 9 July 1864, after an evening with relatives, Thomas Briggs walked through Fenchurch Station and entered carriage 69 on the 9.45 Hackney-bound train. Little did he know that he was travelling into history ...
A few minutes later, two bank clerks entered the compartment. As they sat down,...
| Author | Charles Duff |
| ISBN | 0940322676 |
A Handbook on Hanging is a Swiftian tribute to that unappreciated mainstay of civilization: the hangman. With barbed insouciance, Charles Duff writes not only of hanging but of electrocution, decapitations, and gassings; of innocent men executed and of executions botched; of the bloodlust of mobs...
| Author | Jane Robins |
| ISBN | 1848541082 |
Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty are three women with one thing in common. They are spinsters and are desperate to marry. Each woman meets a smooth-talking stranger who promises her a better life. She falls under his spell, and becomes his wife. But marriage soon turns into a terrifying...
| Author | Lucy Moore |
| ISBN | 0156006405 |
Georgian London was a city of extraordinary contrast: its elegance and refinement thrived amid appalling filth and foul smells, decadence and depravity. Crime was everywhere, from pickpockets and prostitutes to murderous highwaymen, as London bulged with riches from its overseas colonies. The...
| Author | Charles Nicholl |
| ISBN | 0099274043 |
Charles Nicholl is on a quest for 'The Great Cocaine Story'. The time is the early eighties and the place - Colombia. The Fruit Palace is a little whitewashed café that legally dispenses tropical fruit juices, has another purpose as the meeting place for a variety of black market activities and the place...
| Author | John Emsley |
| ISBN | 0192806009 |
Was Napoleon killed by the arsenic in his wallpaper? How did Rasputin survive cyanide poisoning? Which chemicals in our environment pose the biggest threat to our health today? With The Elements of Murder, John Emsley answers these questions and offers a fascinating account of five of the most toxic...
| Author | Ivor Noël Hume |
| ISBN | 0813913233 |
Hume's book is non-fiction and is about the uncovering of an early 1600's settlement near Jamestown. The book is well written and can be enjoyed by both anthro/archeology buffs as well as mystery fans. The book details the perserverance and patience a researcher needs to discover the smallest particles...
