Murder Room

16 total works

The Victorian Underworld

by Donald Thomas

Published 12 March 1998

Defined by night houses and cigar divans, populated by street people and entertainers, the Victorian underworld was an insular yet diffuse community, united by its deep hatred of the police. Its gin shops and taverns were teeming with thieves, beggars, cheats, forgers and pickpockets, preying on rich and poor alike. Career criminals sometimes showed a craftsmanship that would put their descendants to shame: it took true professionals to remove a vast fortune from the Bank of England, and in one case conspirators even recruited officers from Scotland Yard. Those who failed in such enterprises found themselves in the convict hulks, where the mortality rate might reach 40 per cent, or in the new prisons, their faces masked and identified only by numbers. Donald Thomas's novels and biographies have been steeped in the "other England" of Victoria's reign - a place of Hogarthian realism untouched by middle-class propriety. In this book he depicts that underworld through the eyes of its inhabitants.

The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes

by Donald Thomas

Published 23 May 1997

For more than two decades, Sherlock Holmes played a vital, though secret, role in solving the major crimes and scandals of his day - some too damaging to the monarchy, the government or the security of the nation to be fully revealed at the time. Compiled in narrative form by Dr Watson soon after the great detective's death, Holmes's notes have been kept under lock and key at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Now, seventy years later, we can finally open the secret casebook of Sherlock Holmes. 'Seven stories about the greatest of all fiction detectives ...all told by Dr Watson in a very credible imitation of the original style' Birmingham Post

The Day the Sun Rose Twice

by Donald Thomas

Published 23 May 1985

When Karl Rainer Andor came to Berlin for the last time it was sacrifice, not victory, that was uppermost in his mind. He intended to use the plutonium bomb he had elaborately planted to effect the reunification of Germany, but he didn't expect to survive. The 'allied' powers are concerned as much with scoring off each other as with finding the bomb - or with seducing or frightening Andor into telling them where it is. And eventually they are faced with the impossible task of evacuating the historic capital of Germany.

Sherlock Holmes and the Running Noose

by Donald Thomas

Published 24 August 2001

Relating Sherlock Holmes's part in real-life crimes of the day, Donald Thomas brings the Great Detective to life once again in six narratives that display Holmes at his most determined, inventive and downright devious. What were Holmes's views on Dr Crippen? And what happened when Oscar Wilde visited Baker Street to seek advice? How did Holmes uncover a loving husband as one of the most dangerous psychopaths of modern times? And just what horrors await Holmes in the darkened slums of Waterloo Road? 'Thomas's imitation is wryly and subtly done' Guardian

The Arrest of Scotland Yard

by Donald Thomas

Published 26 November 1993

When John Posthumous Lerici, decadent poet, black magician and unacknowledged son of Lord Byron, is murdered, the family hire Inspector Swain. His investigations lead Swain through the familiar hunting grounds of Victorian Brighton and Pimlico. But as the truth of Lerici's criminal associations come to light, it reveals the corruption of Scotland Yard officers by two of the century's most skilful international swindlers and blackmailers, Harry Benson and Billy Kurr.

The Blindfold Game

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

The sensational events of the summer of 1907 - the disappearance of the Ascot Gold Cup from the Royal Enclosure, and the even more astonishing theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from a locked and guarded strongroom in Dublin Castle - remain mysterious but apparently random events. Only one man knows their secret. Captain Richard Gaudeans, cashiered officer, conman and cracksman, cuts a more appropriate figure among the fairground booths where he earns his living than the corridors of power. But the course of the year takes him into both. And in both he uses his skill and cunning to outmanoeuvre everyone in his path.

The Ripper's Apprentice

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

In the slum alleys of Lambeth in 1891 a sinister silk-hatted figure lurks in the shadows - but trade is there for the taking and a girl must make a living. Now, one after another, the girls who work the Waterloo Road wake in the morning to feel the slow agony of the most vicious of poisons ...victims of the man called Fred. The police have only a string of 'catch me if you can' letters to taunt them, whilea whole mailing list of Victorian worthies find demands for money with menaces in their mail. Inspector Swain investigates ...'Original story told in a highly individual manner' Times Literary Supplement

Jekyll, Alias Hyde

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

Robert Louis Stevenson's strange and sinister tale of the gentle Dr Jekyll and the sadistic Mr Hyde is filled with oddities suggesting a dark reality behind a classic fiction. That dark reality is laid bare in the casebook of Inspector Swain. The 'parliamentary murder' of 1884 leads the inspector and his portly sergeant, Lumley, from plush drawing-room to madhouse cell in search of the link between a coward in the red-coated ranks at Isandhlwana, a killer in Cheyne Walk and the satanic persona of Edward Hyde.

Red Flowers for Lady Blue

by Donald Thomas

Published 10 August 2001

It is 1936 - the year of the Abdication Crisis - and gangland capo Sonny Tarrant's money-laundering operation is being threatened by three small-time thieves thinking big.

Would-be gangsters Sandboy, McGouran and Gillis have carried out a violent raid on the premises of furrier Pelly Pender. But Pender insists to the police that no attack took place, for he knows the trio will face a different justice in which the law plays no part. And Sandboy soon finds himself caught in a nightmare world in which Tarrant manipulates his victims with the deftness of a flick-knife.

His last hope is Yvonne Manders, once the stage-dancer 'Lady Blue' . . .

The Blood Runs Hot

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

Two petrol bombs thrown on the Cakewalk promenade, a sports reporter and his bike rammed off a cliff, a policeman thrown through a plate-glass display window in the city centre and left to die. All this is 'a quiet summer weekend' in the dockland city of Canton and its Art Deco resort town of Ocean Beach.

Chief Inspector Sam Hoskins links the investigation of these crimes, but political chicanery hampers him on both sides: on the left is ambitious young Eve Ricard riding to national fame and fortune on 'women's issues, media bias, and insensitive policing'; to the right is the monstrously corrupt councillor and aged razor-boy Carmel Cooney, with his girls and clubs and rackets ...

'Strong on city life and the interplay between policemen and local politics' Independent

Scream Blue Murder

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

The Man had only once followed her home in the evening, after she had been to a Blue Moon concert with Claire and Viv. Still, Elaine was not frightened. It amused her to have an admirer who was far too timid to approach. On that evening, she had been tempted to give him a fright, to swing round and confront him. Or she might look down from the top of the bank and ask him if he had now seen everything he wanted. But that would be like breaking the rules of a private game. Then, perhaps, The Man might become dangerous ...

'The book shows a bleak and unprepossessing gallery of villainous talent' Punch

Money With Menaces

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

Wednesday 5 January is a black day in the police calendar of dockland Canton and its Art Deco resort of Ocean Beach. It dawns in freezing mist and icy roads. It ends with a vanload of drugs hijacked, two policemen dead, and gunfire on the motorway. DCI Sam Hoskins and his sergeant, Jack Chance, are meanwhile embroiled in a fruitless investigation of Billy Catte, seaside arcade proprietor and club-owner.

In a political storm that pits zealous social workers against municipal gangsters, as well as police against revenge and kidnap, Hoskins holds the tenuous thread on which several lives depend ...

Dancing in the Dark

by Donald Thomas

Published 4 December 1992

'Pretty Boy' Johnny McIver is a small-time crook thinking big. But when he and his girlfriend 'Solitaire' cross gangland chief Sonny Tarrant he is soon made to realise how small he really is. Forced on the run for a murder he did not commit, trying to lose himself among the post-war Bournemouth holidaymakers, Johnny McIver is a man in panic, a man 'dancing in the dark'. A man who could soon be dancing at the end of a rope...

An Underworld at War

by Donald Thomas

Published 3 July 2003

The Second World War produced numerous acts of self-sacrifice, but it also made many people rich. Under the cover of war, crime ranging from opportunistic looting to systematic theft was able to flourish.

Donald Thomas draws on extensive archive material to reveal the ingenuity and sheer scale of wartime criminality, making fascinating reading of one of the great untold stories of the war.

'A mesmerising, unputdownable and brilliantly researched page-turner' Sunday Times

Villains' Paradise

by Donald Thomas

Published 12 September 2005

With the war over, the forties, fifties and sixties have the aura of a golden age. But nostalgia is deceptive. From teenage Teddy Boy razor gangs and casual stabbings at dance halls to the psychopathic Krays, Mad Frankie Fraser and Ronnie Biggs, Villain's Paradise reveals the chilling true story of the crimes of post-war Britain. With the narrative pace of the best detective fiction, Donald Thomas explores the most compelling cases of the era from the GBP2.5 million Great Train Robbery of 1963 to the Brighton police corruption scandal. The villains include gangland boss Jack Spot, Acid Bath Murderer Haigh (who liked to drink his victims' blood), sexual predator Neville Heath and the Messina brothers, who controlled international prostitution in London.

Mad Hatter Summer

by Donald Thomas

Published 14 July 2013

The man the world knew as Lewis Carroll, author of the adventures of Alice, was known to his colleagues in the Christ Church Common Room as the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a middle-aged Oxford don. His hobby was photography, especially of pubescent girls 'in their favourite dress of nothing to wear'. When evidence of the Reverend's pastime falls into the hands of Charles Augustus Howell, the infamous Victorian blackmailer, and a murder victim is fished out of the Isis, Inspector Swain is called to investigate the case that casts the shadow of doom over Dodgson. 'One of the most entertaining mysteries of the year' Julian Symons 'Catches the authentic whiff of steaming sexuality behind the Victorian whiskers' Guardian