“The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime”, by Judith Flanders

576 pages, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN-13: 978-1250048530

The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders is a fascinating look at how the prim-and-proper Victorians created the modern spectator sport surrounding murder trials and other violent crimes. Our author follows several headlining cases of murder from the Victorian era (that would be from June 1837 until January 1901) and how each one contributed to the evolution of crime investigation and journalism, both of which grew up simultaneously alongside one other. Thus, we can blame those blasted Victorians for the present-day media circuses that surround every high-profile murder, but we can also thank them for a great deal of the modern criminal justice system; modern police procedure as we know it only really came into being in the 19^th Century, and newspapers in this time became much more exciting, crammed with yellow journalism and sensationalism (indeed, newspapers often convicted a suspect before he ever set foot in a courtroom – think “fake news” is a modern phenomenon? Think again – and this book details the history of newspapers’ involvement with several early crime cases).

Seeing as this book is entirely set in Britain, I confess that I hadn’t heard of most of these cases; the often grisly crimes described here, the media representations of them and the public reactions to them make for fascinating reading (as when the body of poor Harriet Lane, who had been missing for a year was finally discovered, “Harriet Lane” became a macabre joke name for tinned meat. Jesus). Oh, I heard of the last one, alright, for Flanders winds up her book with a final chapter detailing the ravages of one Jack the Ripper, which in her telling seems a culmination of all the murder sprees she described preceding it, rather than an outlier. This is not a detailed list of murders with gory details; rather Flanders highlights various murders and how they were integrated into novels (Dickens, Thackeray and Collins among others), newspapers and…Staffordshire pottery. She also examines how English law changed during this time in history, largely because of how crime was perceived.

I found The Invention of Murder to be an enjoyable read, especially if you love all things English and Victorian culture and history, especially. We all complain about how modern culture is awash in violence and gore, and think it is a modern-day phenomenon; what Flanders’ book illustrates that our interest in “true crime” is not new. If you are looking for a pure true crime hit list this is not for you; if you have an interest in scholarly works and history you will enjoy it very much.

“Antony and Cleopatra”, by Colleen McCullough

567 pages, William Morrow & Company, ISBN-13: 978-1416552949

Antony and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough is the seventh and last book in her “Masters of Rome” series and spans the years 41 to 27 BC. The series has a thesis (first introduced in 1939 by Sir Ronald Syme in his epic historical treatise “The Roman Revolution”): as Rome became more powerful within the Mediterranean world, the old ways of doing things – through the deliberation of various interests, mainly aristocratic and mercantile – became impossibly cumbersome. It became more and more difficult to govern an empire with institutions originally designed to administer a city-state. Certain powerful leaders (especially Marius, Sulla, and Caesar) tried to create a state in which they had autocratic power but also preserved the externals of the old ways. They were opposed by the conservatives (called the optimates by classical historians, though they themselves preferred the title boni or “good men”). The obtuse or simply ignorant resistance of these reactionaries, who are all (except for Cato) presented as degenerate or self-serving, made the creation of an autocracy necessary. The result was the birth of an imperial monarchy, and a radically different organization of power. Each book in the series features a detailed glossary, hand-drawn illustrations of the major characters, and notes by McCullough detailing her reasoning for portraying certain events in certain ways.

The novel spans the years from the aftermath of the Battle of Philippi and the suicide of Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus until the downfall of the second triumvirate, the final war of the Roman Republic and the renaming of Octavian to Augustus in 27 BC. The novel, which was McCullough’s last in the series, focuses mainly on the famous love story between Mark Antony, victor at Philippi, and Cleopatra, earlier the lover of Julius Caesar. This book differs greatly from Shakespeare’s treatment of these events; Cleopatra is portrayed as no great beauty, but rather an inept politician who helps ruin Antony’s cause by publicly meddling in affairs of state, and Antony is, for much of the book, far more in love with Cleopatra’s wealth than her person. Caesarion is portrayed as a gifted, idealistic youth who would be far happier had he never been a king, and who is not happy with his mother’s ambitious plans to make him ruler of all the East. Octavian and his wife Livia are depicted as pragmatic to the point of total ruthlessness but not needlessly cruel.

The rest is all here, though: battles, conspiracies, romance, conniving and some outrageous puns, all dished up in McCullough’s artful style. This novel fits in very neatly with the rest of the series, and it’s a grand, eye-opening adventure for the reader. While some of the action in the book is rather compressed, the psychological base and giving a new spin on history is top notch. This is what I really like about this series by McCullough: the subtlety and the engagement, for while she’s not adverse about putting a bit of creativity in the story, she also knows her facts. And it’s here that makes her storytelling so good: she creates characters (that just happen to be real people) that the reader can feel deeply about, and while you might not like them personally, they are compelling all the same. Along the way, there’s plenty of details about daily life, the way that the ancients looked at the world around them and some deeply moving prose. For those who have managed to stay with the series from the very beginning, this one provides an adequate tying up of a lot of the loose strings from the previous work, The October Horse. While this book, as with all of the others, can stand well on its own, it really does help to know some of the previous action of the story. If the reader is already fond of novels set in Ancient Rome, this is simply one of the best.

“Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World”, by Matthew Goodman

496 pages, Ballantine Books, ISBN-13: 978-0345527271

Who in the hell were Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, I hear you ask? I knew you were asking that, Dear Reader, ‘cause that’s what I asked myself when I picked up Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman at 2^nd & Charles. So I’ll tell you: Nellie Bly was the pen-name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, an American (female) journalist who began her career with the Pittsburgh Dispatch before moving on to the New York World and who was a pioneer in her field by launching a new kind of investigative journalism, as when she went undercover to report on a mental institution from within; Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore was also an American (female) journalist and author who began her writing career as a teenager by sending poetry to the New Orleans Times Democrat where she soon went to work for the paper before moving to New York City and writing for The Sun and New York World, as well as become an editor at Cosmopolitan and contributing to the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. So now you know.

What Eighty Days is about is these two women’s race around the world in late 1888 and early 1889, à la Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days. It began when Bly approached John Cockerill, the editor of the New York World, about besting the fictional Fogg by accomplishing in fact what Fogg did in fiction. While at first Cockerill refused the request, about a year later he and his boss, Joseph Pulitzer, decided that such a deed accomplished by a plucky Yankee girl would be a grand piece of publicity for the paper, and so a year after she first suggested it, Nellie Bly boarded the Hamburg America steamer Augusta Victoria at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889 (with a mere two days' notice) and began her historic 25,000 mile journey…meanwhile, John Brisben Walker, who had just purchased the three-year-old and still-fledgling Cosmopolitan, decided to dispatch Bisland on her own journey around the world and, a mere six hours after being recruited, Bisland departed from New York, only she traveled west by train in contrast to Bly traveling East by boat. It would prove to be a story for the ages.

I won’t spoil the conclusion for you, but I will say that Eighty Days was part adventure story and part travelogue as Goodman described the long-lost world of the Pax Britannica, in which the mighty British Empire made the world safe for travel by these two American gals. The story is fascinating and is written in such an engaging manner and at such a fast clip as to remain entertaining throughout, without the dry spells I often seem to hit somewhere near the middle. At the same time, it is packed with insight and information about the two travelers and their world and culture; while some of these stories felt like filler, I enjoyed them all the same and thought they added to the over-all tale, even if they were tangential to the same. I came away from Eighty Days feeling very well informed, not only about Bly and Bisland’s daring travels, but about things such as the origin of modern time zones, the conditions of coal stokers on those great Victorian steamships and the struggle of female journalists to make it off society pages and into real reporting. My biggest complaint is that I fell that the book seemed biased towards Bly, but I thank Goodman for bringing to light this little-known story of Yankee feminine daring-do.