Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
“Murder is no parlour game likely to be solved on the last page but in act of terrible and terrifying significance.”, so relished with glee Dr. Lucy Worsley as she read from the book that set a new style of British crime fiction, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
The final part of Dr. Lucy Worsley’s fascinating look at the British pre-occupation with murder centred on the Edwardian age and beyond. From the terrible murder involving the seemingly innocuous Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen through to the way that murder became almost sanitised, cleaned and cleansed as parlour games and the rise of cinema and its own Golden Age of Film Noir in which the murderer became the celebrity in classics such as Brighton Rock and the outstanding Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage.
Dr. Worsley’s echoing of the quote that adorned Graham Green’s novel seems to capture the way that 100 years on from the Crippen case, the nation still seems to be obsessed with the thought of the nefarious crime. She urged the viewer to look through their television planners and see the amount of crime that gets solved through the detection of various detectives, both amateur and professional. Dr. Worsley could have gone further by suggesting the next time you pick up a newspaper or magazine, just how many of those watching her enthuse about the subject will go over the smallest detail in an attempt to try and solve the case before the modern day police.
The pre-second World War may have become sanitised with the advent of games and the thousands of books that were written, some formulaic, some of them simply brilliant, especially the works of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie but if Dr. Worsley had continued on, past the destruction of life on the biggest scale ever seen, would that still have been the case. Murder in the 19th and early 20th Century may have been brutal, calculating and abhorrent but it was, with a couple of exceptions, almost sensationalised in the rush to sell more fiction, the drive to appeal to a more literate society, now the celebrity of murder seems to have taken that next turn with more and more books dedicated to true life murder. Somehow the significance of no longer being a parlour game is all too terrifying.
An exceptional series presented by a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic historian.
Ian D. Hall