When George Orwell wrote his essay Decline of the English Murder in 1946, deploring the craven, senseless killings that abounded in post-war Britain (as opposed to the so-called classic murders of Doctors Crippen, Palmer, and the rest), he was half-joking—but only half. As historian Lucy Worsley points out in her introduction to The Art of the English Murder (broadcast on BBC Four as A Very British Murder), the British have always “enjoyed and consumed the idea of murder”: whether real or fictional hardly matters.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 2215-0374 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00026-7 ID - ref1 ER -