In A Lady’s Guide to Gossip and Murder, the second book in Dianne Freeman’s historical mystery series featuring the Countess of Harleigh, the adventurous countess finds out just how far some will some go to safeguard secret. Some issues are timeless, like money, independence, and family relationships. Frances Wynn, the widowed Countess of Harleigh, is…
In Carolyn Kirby’s debut novel, The Conviction of Cora Burns, Cora’s buried past begins to unearth itself, and Cora must find out where we first learn violence: from our scars or from our hearts. Victorian England is a terrible place for an impoverished woman. Cora Burns knows this firsthand. Born to a mother she knows only…
Criminal Element is thrilled to welcome author Charles Finch and his longtime editor (and the host of Case Closed, our new podcast series!) Charles Spicer. The two recently sat down to discuss Finch’s newest Charles Lenox mystery The Vanishing Man, Shakespearean London, England’s class system, and the what-ifs of time travel. *** Charles Spicer: Did…
Charles Finch’s The Vanishing Man is a prequel to his Charles Lenox Victorian series in which the theft of an antique painting sends Detective Lenox on a hunt for a criminal mastermind. …His eyes returned to the much smaller, smoky painting. Number five. It was in a wood frame, not gilt like the others, and…
GIFnotes: Giving you the basic plot summary of an upcoming book with the help of the Graphics Interchange Format. A scandalous novel set in the Gilded Age, full of family secrets, affairs, and even murder—take a visual tour of Lauren Willig's The English Wife!
*Deep breaths* Okay. Because I am a Gothic Victorian novelist well versed in Penny Dreadful’s tropes and subject matter, I’ve spent the past few months railing on panels (like DragonCon), ranting on Twitter, writing requested posts about the ending of the show, and addressing the regressive aspects of the finale and the storytelling disservice to…
When searching for inspiration for Beloved Poison, the dark and extraordinary history of 19th-century medicine offered an evocative, alarming, and exciting world. The setting for my novel was an infirmary. Ramshackle and decaying, I used Old St. Thomas’s Hospital in London as my template. Instead of being places of hope and cure, in the mid-19th century,…
Beloved Poison by E. S. Thomson is a richly atmospheric Victorian crime novel, set in crumbling 1850s London infirmary, where murder is the price to be paid for secrets kept (Available September 13, 2016). Beloved Poison by E. S. Thomson is a beautifully dark portrait of Victorian London that I believe Charles Dickens would feel right…
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale is a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London. In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London — for ten days in…
When I began drafting my debut novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, I had recently been studying in London on scholarship. One of the most striking experiences during my time there was taking a Jack the Ripper walking tour. Walking those literal haunts created the entire sub-plot of my book, which will…
