As a former policewoman, Blessin Adams is well aware of the human cost of murder. In Great and Horrible News, this moving nonfiction study, she investigates the crimes that shook Tudor and Stuart England. In doing so, she approaches her cases forensically: and what a diverse bunch of true crimes they are. In these pages readers will meet an opportunistic cutthroat (and born-again Christian); a pitiable rape victim accused of infanticide; a cocky would-be assassin; a young woman strangled and dumped in a river (which Adams unpicks with an Agatha Christie-esque flair – though this one’s not recommended for dog lovers); a murderous mother driven by religious fanaticism; a desperate family reduced by unjust laws to mutilating a corpse; a heartless foster mother in charge of a house of horrors; and a tragic failed politician.
Adams writes about murders with the eye of Tarantino or Hitchcock in Frenzy: brutal, bloody killings are enacted in all their heart-stopping, gory glory, with each slash and ineffectual defensive claw painfully related. This is not a book for the faint hearted (though a ghoul like me lapped it up); the descriptions of the penalty for treason are particularly toe-curling. Yet it is not mere schlock or sensationalist slasher. The real pleasure of this book is the way the author understands and relates human stories. We follow these people. We understand their everyday lives, their acts of kindness, their desires, their greed, and their fears. We care about them. This makes the murders described in such graphic detail all the more horrifying and tragic. Astutely, Adams knows what quite a few filmmakers could learn: that for genuine emotional effect, we need to be invested in the human stories.
Central too is analysis of how these crimes were recorded, framed, and reframed at the time. A constant throughout the book is the role of the public as active agents in detection, as bloodthirsty true crime aficionados, and as consumers who had to be catered to by divines, authors, and publishers. This will strike a chord with contemporary readers, accustomed as we are to popular Netflix documentaries and YouTube videos which dissect real cases and result in (or shape) strong public opinions. Recognisable too is another long-lived phenomenon which Adams teases out: that readers, even centuries ago, were far more interested in killers than their victims, the result being that pamphleteers were never shy about dramatising crimes to the extent that murder victims were reduced to mere props to be used by those sensationalising the murders. So too were trials apt to throw up causes celebres, with legal experts constructing competing narratives in the public forum of the courtroom – to the prurient delight of the wider public.
Great and Horrible News is as compulsively readable as the pulp true crime anthologies of the 80s and 90s (of which I’m an unashamed fan), but with added layers of sensitivity, analysis, and historical insight. Grab a copy and read it – but keep all the lights on.
Steven Veerapen is a historian and author of Of Blood Descended.
