 Mae'r barysau yn y gwirionedd. Fy fydda'n gwybod a fwy'n gweithio y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell i gael y gwaith ddechrau'n eu gwirionedd a ddwy'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n ddod i'n gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'n amserion gweithio'n gwirionedd o'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell yn yr ysgrifennu gyflawn, ac yn yr ysgrifennu Llyfrgell yn yr ysgrifennu gyda'r Llyfrgell, i chi'n rhai'r ein hunain a'r llyfrigau ar gyfer yng nghymru a'i gweld i chi i ddweud yng Nghymru. Ym hwn yn y Llyfridd Llyfridd, mae'n hyn i'n gwybod gyda'r Exhibisi Fyllt. Mae'r dweudio'n gwneud hynny'n gweld i chi. Roeddwn i chi'n gwybod i chi. Mae'n cael ei ddweud yng nghymru. Mae'n gwneud y 500 ydyn nhw, ac mae'n gwneud yng Nghymru yn y Gweithgol. Mae'n gwneud yng nghymru, mae'n gwneud yng nghymru, ac inni gynnig wedi'i angen am wneud o oranges a dw i'r hystianolfa cymryd yma bod y gallu rhonddoedd a'r rhan o'rallas o'r sinusio a'r sinnes oherwydd yn gweithio bod gwnaeth ymddangos o wybod o'r panell Luminus yn hynny'r modd. Rwy'n gweinio gyda Hallee Rubenholdd yn ychydigolol, peall y bwysig o'r hyn i'w gwellwyr o'r bwysig o'r bwysig. Hallee'r lluniau was a Sunday Times bestseller, won the Bailey Gifford prize for non-fiction and has been optioned for a drama series. Halle is a bestselling author, social historian, broadcaster, podcaster, historical consultant for TV and film and her other works include The Covent Garden Ladies on the true story of a notorious guy to Georgian London's sex workers and Lady Wersley's Wim about the 18th century's most infamous adultery trial. But today we'll be talking about this extremely important, significant book, The Five. Next up, Graham McCravenet, who joins us all the way from Glasgow. Thanks for coming down, Graham, and a shout out to Glasgow. We want more writers from Glasgow and the North in general, so I'm delighted that you're here. Graham is the author of The Disappearance of Adele Biddo. Is that how you pronounce Biddo? I pronounce it Biddo, but my French is terrible. Oh, well, few. I'll bow to you on that. The Accident on the A35, this one, which is the book that we'll be talking about tonight, His Bloody Project, which was book a prize shortlisted. And he also most recently wrote a stunning work, Case Study, which I also really urge you to buy. His Bloody Project is a novel on which Robert Louis Stevenson might have bestowed envy according to no other person than Robert McCrum, and it's been published in over 20 languages. Thank you, Robert McCrum. Graham was the author of The Year 2017 in the Sunday Hell. I'm always my author of The Year 20. And then last but not least, we've got Shreben Ibassu. She's a British library favourite. We always have you here. You basically live here, don't you, Shreben Ibassu? She's a journalist, a Sunday Times bestselling author. Her book, I've got stickers on it, my apologies. Her books include Forking and Another Country, Victoria and Abdul, which was made into a massive Hollywood movie starring Judy Dench. So some very nice red carpet action for you there. And also Spy Princess, The Life of Noor in Ayat Khan. Like Halley, Shreben I has formed in giving life to women who have been denied or annihilated by history for which we're very grateful. Today, Shreben I is sharing her most recent work, a startling piece of astonishing research, of a story that should be very well known but isn't. And it's the critically acclaimed The Mystery of the Parsi lawyer, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edelgey and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village. And then we have also our very own Tamara Tubb, who is our sensational personal tour guide, because Tamara works here at the British Library. She's project curator for news, radio and the moving image team. But she also is one of the people who worked so hard to create the Breaking the News exhibition. She's one of our curators. Tamara's research interests include celebrity throughout the ages, early modern textual cultures and the 21st century news environment. So we've got a safe pair of sensationalist hounds with Tamara. And I'm going to start with you tomorrow. I'm going to come straight to you. And I'd like you please to set the scene of sensationalism at its roots in what we call the decade of sensationalism. So take us back to the 1860s. Absolutely, yes. So the 1860s are known as the decade of sensationalism. This was in part because of three genre defining novels that were published at the very beginning of that decade. We've got Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Ellen Woods' East Lim, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Orderly's Secret. These stories very much focused on mystery, on melodrama, on creating narratives that would shock and elicit emotional responses from their readers. There was a strong focus on sex, sexuality and scandal as well. It's no small thing that two of those titles actually feature women in them. So it's The Woman in White and Lady Orderly's Secret. Women played a huge part in this genre, especially in the Victorian era, and so a lot of this work is very much to do with women and their representation. These books were an instant success. I mean, they almost immediately spawned dramatisations and ushered in an age of sensationalist theatre, which, again, very much focused on the melodramatic on cliffhangers. Books, and the theatre came before the press as we know it, the sensationalist press. There were elements of sensationalism in the press, and you had the penny dreadfuls and penny bloods and things like that. There would be perhaps not as widely circulated as newspapers as we know them today, things like The Times of London, which was the biggest kind of high brown newspaper in the Victorian era. But building on that and building on the popularity of the sensationalist literary novel in theatre, we had the Illustrated Police News, and that started life in 1864. The 1860s were very much the kind of a hot house of sensationalist literature, and the audiences loved that, but it didn't just erupt from nothing. There's no coincidence that these three major novels happened at the same time. There were, this does have longer roots in history, so a lot of the news coverage in the penny dreadfuls or the 18th century execution pamphlets. It's human nature. We've always had a bit of a macabre fascination. We want to know about the subversive, the gory, the dangerous and the disgusting. So there had always been pamphlets and stories, especially Hangman's Confessions and things like that, and the last words from the prison cell. But it was very much in the 1860s that the conditions were right for this to make a more mass-market mainstream appeal. Were there reasons that The Times were right for that kind of appetite? Or were there technological reasons that this had such a success? Absolutely, yes. So throughout the late Georgian, early Victorian period, there had been a series of laws and reforms brought in. Education was a lot more available to people, not yet completely free, but it was becoming more and more common for children to be educated. They would at least be taught how to read, not always how to write, which is a weird quirk, something that had been happening for hundreds of years. Male and female children were being taught to read, those from working-class families as well as the higher echelons of society. This then, in the mid-century, made sure that there was a large reading audience and a large female reading audience as well. Female readers have traditionally been an audience for sensationalist novels, reading about these naughty, mysterious, or otherwise exciting women in the novels. As the education system was improving, more access to education was coming about. Also, the modern police force was being formed. From the 1820s, the Metropolitan Police were founded. Then in the 1840s, the first detectives, the job of the detective was invented as well. This sparked huge interest, especially with a lot of the social writers of the day, people like William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. Famously as well, he used to tail the early Scotland Yard detectives, and he would write articles about their exploits, some elements slightly fictionalised, some very much purporting to be their day-to-day activities in the news. We'll see how all of this filters down into the work of our writers here today, but one thing that I just noticed is we all just walked around together around the exhibition, and again, I urge you to go. But how much some of these headlines from the decade of sensation have just seemed very familiar, they seem very now, that some things have changed and some things really haven't changed at all, also that it's whilst it centres women and frames them as victims, often it's also geared towards a female audience, which is curious, but more of that later. I want to come to the heart of darkness and sensationalism and to 1888 and to you, Hallie, and your book, The Five, which is, I think, quite an extraordinary standing up to the iconography and the persistent mythology, indeed often celebration of the criminal, Jack the Ripper, even the term is such a matey term. I think it's an extraordinary work. Can you introduce what your intention was with the writing of this book? Well, what I wanted to do was to actually reverse the narrative, because in fact the narrative that we have all accepted started with the sensationalist press. It started in 1888, it started with these five murders, possibly more, the White Chapel murders in general, there are a series of murders, and the press obviously jumped all over this in 1888. It's interesting, tomorrow I was talking about the 1860s being this time when there was this sudden interest in sensationalism, but I think this continues to grow, and what I've noticed is progressively after the education acts are introducing the 1870s, then it just starts growing exponentially. Interest in newspapers, in news in general, actually, because more and more people become literate, and so by 1888 you do have a greater number of people who are able to read too. You may be able to correct me, I can't remember precisely, but I think there was something like 12 dailies in London alone in 1888, or a number like that. So huge appetite for story, and when these murders happened and they were grotesque and they were really unlike anything that anyone had seen before, the press just flocked to the East End, and of course nobody had any answers, they weren't able to catch the murderer, and these murders just kept happening over a series of weeks, and so the stories and the speculation started brewing, and then because there was this kind of lacuna, this gap in understanding and knowledge of what was going on, everything jumped into this from all the fears and concerns of Victorian society, where it was like it held mirror to itself. Well, you know, is Jack the Ripper foreigner? Is Jack the Ripper a doctor? Is Jack the Ripper a Jew in the East End playing on fears of antisemitism? And then of course the portrayal of the women. And then the portrayal of the women, of course, which comes to the very heart of what I wrote, which is what sort of women would be outside in a very bad part of town in order to get murdered. Again, it's looking for this like, you know, flipping this so that the onus is on the women who were out because, well, only bad women were out at night. Good women were home with their fathers or their husbands or whoever was the owner of the householder that they were meant to be living in. And these women were, you know, alcoholics. They lived in lodging houses, and lodging houses had terrible reputations. They were considered the homes of the homeless. So they were dispossessed women. And only a dispossessed, the only type of woman who wouldn't have a home would be a morally defective woman. And morally defective women were prostitutes. And so that assumption was there really from the beginning. And the press, you know, just elaborated. The press reflected all of society's fears, all of society's expectations, all of their prejudices were poured into a coverage of this. And so what I wanted to do was really try to cut through the layers, strip back the layers and figure out, so what is Victorian supposition? What is hearsay? What is all of this stuff that we layer, layer, layer? And where's the actual history? And where's the context for all of this? And so that's what the book seeks to do. I think it's a magnificent piece of work. And also I think what you've done, which is very subversive, is flying the face of the way that this story's been built up over the many intervening years and to almost a kind of industrial version of the myth. You know, it's a product. And you instead furnish us with the lives of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane. And at the point of their murders, you look away. You don't give them, you give them their lives. You don't give us their deaths. And I think that's truly amazing. What you've done is the opposite of sensationalism. Absolutely. I wanted to write a life story. I didn't want to write a death story. And the interesting thing is, in this sensationalist narrative, the story always starts with the death of these women. It's like they have a life in the newspapers that starts with their real life death. And the interest in who they were, what they were, was never fully explored. So it's another place from which to start the story and it changes the narrative entirely. Irritatingly, we've all heard of Jack the Ripper and we've all seen that there was a quest to have a museum, London Dungeon very much profited on the gorianess of it. I was sort of apoplect it to find out that my kids were being taught Victorian history through the medium of Jack the Ripper. I'm so glad that you took this action. But there are certain pockets of resistance, shall we say. There is a thing called ripporology. And things as much as I dread a Jack the Ripper forum where your work has been described as, and I quote, a genius money-making social justice indoctrinator. I hope you got that made into a t-shirt. I know I should need that mug somewhere. Tell us a bit about that, about the pushback. It's been awful. I think the thing is, this is the case, it's so interesting having walked around the exhibition because I think we have always throughout history felt ownership of stories and news stories and who owns the truth and what is the truth. And I think the interesting thing about a lot of these pockets of history which historians, I've heard the term used and I think it's a fantastic term, have labelled junk history. So things which are often wrapped up in conspiracy theories. Things like the Romanoffs, the Kennedy assassination, Jack the Ripper. There are real historical events here but because they've become so intertwined with conspiracy a lot of academic historians won't venture into that dark corner because they don't want to feel tainted. So cultural historians will go in and they'll sort through all of this phenomena but to actually address what actually happened here, what's the actual history. People kind of left this in the corners and what has happened is what's gone, because professional historians have abandoned that then people who are just kind of amateurs and are interested in doing their own research and all of that's fine. It's totally fine to do your own research but when it's been left for kind of years and years and years and nobody wants to really give it a serious examination then you have some problems because the canon repeats hearsay and no-one-ever-investigates claims. It's almost like a crusted layer. It's very hard to smash open. That's what it becomes. And you having done that, people said, how dare you? The attempts to discredit me have been extraordinary. I mean there are people, I'm not joking for whom since my book came out even before, their hobby is actually to try to discredit me and they go through my book hundreds of times to try to find sentences that are incorrect and just to construe all sorts of things just to discredit me. I've been called a Holocaust, compared to a Holocaust denier. I've been told, people have said that I'm a fraud that I hid information. I mean there's so much invested in this narrative. I mean denying the sensationalist aspect you've almost generated a new wave of a sensationalist response. It's just too much. May I ask you to read a short section of your brilliant book? I will. In fact you had asked us to kind of look at the concept of sensationalism and so I wanted to just focus in on that in particular as it applied to Annie Chapman who was the second victim and how the press were actually dealing with her death and how they were digesting it and who rushed in and how they rushed in to depict who she was and the life she was living and the experiences she had and where the problems are with that. So the Victorian newspapers ignored such ambiguities. Stories were crafted on top of assumptions and the assumption was always that Annie Chapman was a prostitute. The star newspaper confidently declares we are able to see the kind of existence that women of Chapman's unfortunate class are compelled to live. Probably she did not rise until the shades of night enabled her to ply her hideous trade and she then seems to have spent her time in passing from liquor shop to liquor shop with the fitting companions, male and female of such orgies. But the star and other publications like it failed to view Annie as an individual rather than as a part of a quote an unfortunate class into which all impoverished women regardless of age or circumstance were lumped. As the Daily Mail pointed out no criminal centre is wholly criminal and to represent even the lodging houses of Dorset Street as wholly inhabited by the utterly depraved would be wrong. Unlike what was suggested by the star Annie did not sleep all day in order to rise when the shades of night enabled her to ply her hideous trade. She sowed, crocheted and was intent on earning money through what Amelia Palmer referred to as her own industry. Such depictions of her also did not take into account the state of her health. Annie was seriously, if not terminally ill with tuberculosis. In addition to taking tablets she had two bottles of medicine and what appeared to have been letters of prescription given to her during a visit to St Bartholomew's hospital among her belongings recovered after her death. This as much as her desire to spend the night with Ted Stanley would explain her insistence on having an eight penny double bed. Not only were these doubles surrounded by a wooden partition which afforded a rare degree of privacy but as Elizabeth Allen a fellow lodger at Crossingham's commented an eight penny bed carried with it carried with it greater advantages than those accorded by a four penny dos. The lodgers having the cheaper bed were expected to turn out earlier in the morning. Towards the end of her life Annie would have valued an extra hour in bed before she was put out on the street at mid-morning feverish aching and wracked by coffin fits. Thank you. I confess actually when I first read your book I thought and the premise being that the women were murdered are not prostitutes which is what we've always been taught and I thought it doesn't matter if they were or not nobody deserves to be murdered right but it actually really does matter that their narratives have been untwisted so carefully by you. It's a very important thing. I would like to come next to Graham. I was just reminded of the eight penny bed it's a bit like the hotel I'm staying in around the corner. Oh yeah, at least it's not a four penny you can't say we didn't lavish you Graham. There was a partition but not much more. I think you're allowed to say until about 9.30 maybe. Don't say we don't treat you fine at the British Library. I'll leave a good... I was about to say good things about your book Graham. Now this is a truly remarkable piece of work. I was completely mugged when I read it because I became convinced that it was true even though it's shortlisted for the Brooker Prize for Fiction. I utterly was bewitched. And it is fiction but it's not all fiction because I've noticed in your other work too there are people that are real and some of it feels hyper real and you very fiendishly blur the boundaries between reality and appearance and what we can trust. I mean it's very hard to know who to trust in your books. I think it's a really good approach to any novel or anything you write to not trust it blindly. To be a sceptical reader especially walking around the exhibition. The whole exhibition about the way news is presented to us is about how we consume these headlines and what is the purpose of these headlines what's the agenda behind these headlines. The women being portrayed as responsible for their own murders in your book. So what was your agenda and what's your purpose behind the writing of his publication? I just wanted to get published. I don't know. I think I try as much as possible not to have an agenda but I suppose there was in the context of this conversation I did kind of want to reclaim something about the crofting people. The book is set in 1869 in a very small crofting village in Westeros and you know there's a certain portrayal and you know I've read Halle's books absolutely it's a marvel of research. I love research but I'm an amateur. And reading your book in this portrayal also of the poverty of London at that time. You know just when you're talking about there I'd be really interested here for what you've got to say about this because when I was researching the tremendous poverty in the Highlands of Scotland in the 1860s you can always read accounts of that poverty but not by the poor. So my great challenge was to find things actually from the point of view whether it's prison letters or whatever there was a couple of journalists who rose from those kind of backgrounds and who wrote about these things but that was the challenge actually finding not people writing about it people writing who experienced it. So if I had an agenda I suppose it was to some extent the crofters who had been subject to the Highland clearances famously in the 17th, sorry 18th and 19th century they're always portrayed as kind of almost ennobled by their suffering as noble victims but they're entirely one-dimensional figures you can almost see them sort of standing gazing I mean if you look at paintings of the period there's a famous painting called The Highland Funeral and of course it's all men of course because women weren't permitted to attend funerals I think in certain branches of the church that's a complicated question in Scotland but there's this kind of stoic nobility always Like a Porridge advert It's a bit like, well first you had Scots Porridge Oaks then you had Outlander But it was interesting that Outlander had done wonders for the Scottish filmings but also Diane Gabeldon when she started writing that series had never been to Scotland and that's not a criticism but it's just an interesting fact she had a mythic idea of Scotland and her myth is much more interesting than my myth I don't know what that is I want to bring it back to you totally ripped Highland guys with amazing pectoral muscles which is totally true My myth gets made into a movie Bring it back to his project This is the line from the back The year is 1869 a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick McRae Now some of the torments that were inflicted on Roddy and on his sister and on that family are very hard to endure as a reader and I wondered if I've heard you say actually in the past that you don't plan your work ahead you get sort of led by the characters and see where it ends up and I just wondered if did you find that you got into too much darkness at times and you had to kind of reel it back How did you manage that? I write very chronologically or try to as much as possible so when you know from the beginning of the book Roddy has killed one of his neighbours Lachla Mackenzie and he's got all these regulations on Roddy and his family I think as a novelist you're always trying to gauge what will be the effect on the reader if I write how much do you have to say in order to put the effect that you want over you don't want to say as little as possible so when I came to write the murder scene which I wrote at the end of Andrew McRae's prison memoir so he's writing his own account of what happened so when I wrote the final murder scenes which goes on for some pages and I once heard it read by an actor who was quite an experience because I was like oh my god that's brutal I felt it had to be brutal and there are other incidents in the book that I don't want to write in a sort of salacious way with many adjectives to make it sort of titillating but I wanted to have a profound and shocking effect because these are shocking events so but you're never quite sure and that's why you have your trusted readers to... The other writers here are non-fiction and yours is obviously a work of fiction and we've just looked at how Halle very decisively turned her back on the glorification of violence and you instead you stare it right in the face and we also have to do that too I certainly wouldn't wish to glorify it I mean the other aspect and just that I was reading a little bit about sensationalism and that relationship between the press and his novels and he drew inspiration from true life cases and from headline newspaper headlines and actually His Bloody Project was inspired by a true case in France, a case of French peasant so I didn't know until this week that I'd actually written a sensationalist novel which is really exciting Well readers buy the book and you decide Graham would you like to read a section of these? I'm just going to read very briefly and I'm going to read just half a page I've never read it before I love it when people read a new bit just because it seemed pertinent to what we're talking about and so as I said the book consists mainly of Roderick's memoir and then there's a trial and this I'm reading as you can see from the very end of the book and it's not because I assume you've all read it although I know you're going to after this but there's no spoiler contained in this so this is a post post trial John Murdock had lodged Roddy's manuscript with a local printer Alexander Clark What appeared however was not a complete printing of the 50,000 word document but a 24 page chap hook comprising the most gruesome and sensational passages Within days scores of other greatly bastardised versions were printed up and down the country The most notorious of these was entitled His Bloody Project The Ravings of a Murderer Printed by William Grieve in Glasgow His Bloody Project ran to a mere 16 pages and consisted of little more than Roddy's description of the murders His killing of Laughlin Mackenzie's Sheep followed by the line It was at this moment I discovered my taste for cracking skulls and resolved I would not belong in indulging it again Together with a holy fictional passage in which Roddy wickedly defiled a 12-year-old floor abroad The pamphlet sold tens of thousands of copies in a matter of days Various gruesome cartoons, etchings and ballads, most notably on this fine morning I Killed Three by Thomas Porter followed and rather than becoming a cause celebrity Roddy became a national bogeyman The irony that all these productions portrayed Roddy has been quite out of his mind must have been entirely lost on those who devoured them That was absolutely pertinence to this discussion Shrebeni, we turn to you now and this glorious mystery the mystery of the Parsi lawyer This work has set a couple of decades on from the decade of sensationalism but the inheritance is absolutely there isn't it? The cover, the title obviously but even each of your chapter endings has a delicious cliffhanger and it's very much in the style of the true crime thriller Is it almost a tribute to the genre? It is, I mean I'm a real fan of Arthur Conan Doyle so I do go on his trail as he's solving this mystery and I was discovering myself so I had to keep my reading So put us in the picture, tell us the background to the story Right, so this is set in the action happens in 1903 Well, the mystery lawyer is a man called George Hidalgi He is 28 years old He is a Parsi and Parsi for those of you who don't know are Zoroastrians who left Persia and settled in India So George Hidalgi's father was a Zoroastrian from India who converted to Christianity Sorry, it's a little complicated came to Britain of this little village called Great Wurley So George is he married an English woman so you can just see the picture There is this little mining village sort of south of Birmingham and he's the first Asian the first Indian to be a vicar in Britain So he comes here, he's preaching a brown man with a pronounced Indian accent preaching to an all-white parish with a white wife three half-cast children The eldest of whom, George is a bit odd-looking he's got bulgy eyes he's a bit of a loner So, well, that's a background to the story but moving ahead from 1876 in 1903 terror comes to this little village of Great Wurley cattle are slashed, horses are mutilated it's very gruesome they are just slashed and they are left in the fields to die all their innards spilling out and this obsession with sensationalism postcards were made of these and distributed people went to see these horses people came from surrounding towns the names again he was the Wurley Ripper the police of course, just like a few years ago and all this is fresh in their minds there's Jack the Ripper this is the Wurley Ripper it's called The Village of Fear press are suddenly Great Wurley in the news and police can't do anything six months have gone they can't find a killer there's rumour, there's suspicion there are anonymous letters and of course when all this is raging who do you suspect the only odd family the only brown family in this village and their eldest son who is by now a solicitor George Edelgi and he is suspected and he is arrested he is tried he takes 50 minutes for the jury to pronounce him guilty and he is imprisoned for seven years granted a sentence for seven years and suddenly he is released and he feels he writes this is the second bit he writes to Arthur Conan Doyle because he has been reading his novels in prison and he feels only Arthur Conan Doyle wearing the hat of Sherlock Holmes is going to help him clear his name and Arthur Conan Doyle accepts this challenge so then he actually investigates it he goes to the scene of crime he became totally obsessed he is all there in the book and he just he knows immediately he is like Holmes for all those who are working like Holmes he is making his deductions before the very first meeting he looks at George their first meeting George is in this hotel lobby and he is invited to meet him and he is late and of course he recognises George instantly because he is the only Indian in the room George is reading a newspaper holding it really close to his face and Arthur Conan Doyle stands at the door and very much in Sherlock Holmes mode says his deductions and he says he couldn't have done it because he is myopic severely myopic he couldn't have crossed those fields in the night and slashed cattle and so he knows he is innocent and then the story begins he takes up the case and it goes on and what I find mystifying is that we don't know about this because it has very strong echoes of the Dreyfus Affair and of Emile Zola's it has the same celebrity rocking up to save the day but it was a huge story at the time huge but it just hasn't persisted why is that? well in fact Arthur Conan Doyle himself compares it to the Dreyfus Affair he says this is like the sword in Dreyfus Affair and that happened to a Jew and this is happening to a Parsi and all his fellow writers you know Bram Stoker George Bernard Shaw they all lawed him he is like the champion he is taking on this miscarriage of justice so at the time it's huge George's face is in every newspaper and these articles written by Arthur Conan Doyle are published across the pond so they are in the Washington Times New York Post and George is famous but of course it all over the years it just whizzles out people forget him guess he was just an Indian and that's it but there's a double horror at the heart of this book which is that there's the miscarriage of justice and the years of really awful racist persecution that a nightmare a living nightmare and then of course the terrorizing attacks on the animals so it operates on two very different crimes both feeding this huge story with the addition of a celebrity it really captured the nation and it's interesting you also chart how the reporting was very hostile to Edelgi and then it turns in his favor oh totally can I read some of the stuff they wrote because nothing like hearing their voice not mine right so all the reporting just focuses on George's appearance his oriental appearance his dark skin his everything about him really so I'll read a little bit here well this is the first day of the trial and George had taken care no I'll come straight to the I'll come straight to the ok no I'll read the whole thing George had taken special care to groom himself on the third day of the trial it was the day he would be stepping into the witness box his hair was immaculately combed he had still not been allowed to shave or trim his moustache he was wearing the same three piece check suit he had worn since the beginning of the trial at the start of the day Hardy, this is Justice Hardy declared that the court would sit until 10 p.m. to conclude the case it was clear that he wanted the case wrapped up as quickly as possible the court was packed as usual the locals out in force to hear the accused give evidence the strange looking man who stood in the dock came from a religion that was alien to them they had heard that Barces worshipped the sun and the moon some of them believed they made nocturnal animal sacrifices to please their gods the Wolverhampton Express and Star had captured the mood when it reported the average rustic could see no good in a foreigner and Asiatic comes in the guise of an emissary of the devil we have the daily gazette that reports he is 28 years of age but looks younger he was dressed in a shrunk and black and white check suit and there was little of the typical solicitor in his swarthy face with its full dark eyes prominent mouth and small round chin his appearance is essentially oriental in its validity no sign of emotion escaping him beyond a faint smile so all sorts then we have the the Daily Mail now this is when the sentence is pronounced and the Daily Mail says those who closely studied this extraordinary criminal in the dock no doubt that he is a degenerate of the worst time his jaw and mouth are those of a man of very debased life Idulci has also gained for himself the reputation of being a lover of mystery another oriental trait and one that goes far to explain the anonymous letters he goes on the mercury this one I love there's so much so this is when the sentence is pronounced mercury he seemed to become darker almost black as he leaned over the edge of the dock with the daylight streaming down upon him from the great window his light check suit emphasised the black face and the staring wide-opened gleaming eyes I mean he's almost a monster you know by the sort of the way they write about him really astonishing and he's just building up so George used to be a loner for long walks he didn't drink so he didn't really go to the pub I have too many friends so as the story, while they're still searching the rumours are the long walks become he's prowling in the dock these are the things that are sort of going around this village so it's pretty there's a staggering amount of research that you've undertaken so you also turned detective and put on the Dears Talker hats what most surprised you as you were digging up this story oh so it was the police files I know exactly I mean I was absolutely shocked it is very much line of duty it was so we have the chief we have the chief of police of Staffordshire, G.A. Anson he's a thorough imperialist he's sort of you know a man who believes in empire he cannot stand the Hindu vicar of great early I mean he wasn't even a Hindu he was Zoroastrian converted to Christianity but he just couldn't stand him he hated his wife Charlotte because you know there's a white woman who's married a black man and she's led down the side so there is this man and of course we have Arthur Conan Doyle now investigating the case and the extent to which and of course Anson hates it because Arthur Conan Doyle just says that it was racism, prejudice and incompetence of the police that he was arrested and when he begins his investigation Anson actually lays I don't want to give too much away but he actually lays false trails and he boasts about it which is why I know and it's deep in these police files and he lays false trails to trip up Arthur Conan Doyle so that he can just tell the home office that he doesn't know what he's doing I absolutely love their clash it was really delicious this clash is just amazing and then we also hear that the police in this and Anson himself has written anonymous letters trying to frame George so this was a real shocker there was more I mean the racism was just amazing just from when he was just 12 years old the graffiti this poor big guy and he actually won there for 44 years all he did he just went on and his threats that they were to kill his son threats against him all sorts of really horrible stuff some of it is there in the book and it was quite hard to look at in the National Archives part of these home office records it must have been tied after tied of sort of misery the persecution went on for years and none of this was raised in the trial so hats off to Arthur Conan Doyle he's the one who brought it up because everyone can buy the book now staying with the police I want to come back to you tomorrow some of the themes that you explored in your work putting together the exhibition breaking the news tell us about the illustrated police news you mentioned that earlier both of you went oh that's clearly something that you all know a lot about what was the illustrated police news so the illustrated police news it was very much a successor of the penny dreadfuls the execution what was the penny dreadful so it would be a short pamphlet a couple of pages very sensationalised account of a murder or the kind of hearsay around a murder it's the gossip it's the sensationalised story would these have pictures at this stage or not they would have some pretty terrible woodcuts I think I read that in one I think one of the murderers was actually portrayed by a portrait of King William IV and things like that by no means any accuracy in this they would have an image and they would talk about so it's a big deal that it's illustrated illustrated police news gives it back and the difference that the illustrated police news the differences between that and the penny dreadfuls is that it was a bona fide newspaper because of the advances in printing the ability to now mass produce news they also got rid of stamp taxes so that the tax on knowledge in the 1850s which had previously meant that the price of newspapers was actually very very high and it priced out the working classes that's why it was called the tax on knowledge they got rid of those in the 1850s and that meant in the 1860s that there was an explosion of newspapers as you were saying in London there were at least a dozen maybe 17 catering to all different audiences and it meant that newspapers could diversify as well not only could they reach large audiences because of the lower prices it was only a penny which at this point you're competing with these trashy little pamphlets but it had access to all of the police courts they would send out reporters to the police courts now that policing was a bona fide profession and there was structure and method for the publication of crimes they would send their reporters there they would also hire specific engravers to make high quality images to cover the front pages and so there would be actual images of the people involved in these crimes that were happening in the courts and some of them are quite graphic so the one that you've got in the exhibition right where you go in one of the first parts you see is the sensationalism section so that is Jack the Ripper coverage that is the coverage of Annie Chapman the second victim of the Ripper this front page though strangely enough it's from two weeks after the murder so there's no fresh news here so there is the image glorifying the heinous injuries inflicted upon her the cutthroat the facial injuries but there are also panels as well of just pure speculation and supposition there's a made up image of a guy with a knife running around saying is this the Ripper? saying that apparently there was a man at Tower Bridge Station they're clutching at stores did you spend much time in the pages of the Listeridge media? it's infinitely useful in that you can get a psychological picture of what was going on about time in the mass hysteria those illustrated papers are a whole other level of sensationalism really you can read the story but my god you don't have to be that literate to thumb through the pages this is almost like a comic book playing to the fears and the worries of the Victorian era and it's very much there providing a visual explanation but supposition on what's going on fear is a big part of it you referred to the village of fear fear is definitely a part of the frisson isn't it and that's what's being deployed here I want to point out that we will have time for questions at the end so get your questions ready and also our audience online you are able to drop your questions into the box underneath and they'll be conveyed to us so do get those ready Tamara I'd like to ask you more about this era tell us about W.T. Stead oh yes he's a great guy he was a very influential editor of the Palmal Gazette Palmal Gazette later transformed into the evening standard that I'm sure we're all familiar with but Stead was a pioneering journalist he was a pioneer of what we call the new journalism which married together sensationalist writing that previously the newspapers like The Times had frowned upon he used that language and he realised that to get an audience invested in your story you need to make them feel you want them to be carried along with the story while he didn't go as far as being as lurid or as graphic as other writers or journalists he did change the language that was used but he was also a pioneer of investigative journalism he's become infamous for crossing that line so he went undercover in 1885 so shortly before the Ripper was doing his thing and he went undercover because he was a campaigning journalist as well there was a huge problem in London with child sex trafficking at this era not a lot of people knew about it the Victorian society preferred to turn away it's not a tasteful subject not a tasteful subject but to prove that it was going on he went deep undercover and with the help of the Salvation Army and an ex brothelona he procured, he bought a 13 year old girl Eliza Armstrong from her parents for the sum of £5 some horrific elements did happen he by no means acted on what he did he didn't follow it through to the extremes that would have happened otherwise the Salvation Army did look after her but she was spirited away to France to prove that this could happen and was happening he then wrote about it she was brought back to England she moved to the north got married a couple of times had quite a few children lived relatively happily ever after for the era she was fine but to prove that this had all happened he actually went through it he then reported it in his newspaper over a few days he serialised it as he would with the sensation novels Wilkie Collins and the like but in doing so he exposed himself as having broken the law so he ended up going to prison now in the exhibition we've got his prison uniform and we have the slightly sensationalised reporting of his undercover journalism unlike a lot of journalists ordinary things like the phone hacking scandal and the Leveson inquiry he didn't face any public backlash though he did break the law and had to pay the cost of it he was widely praised his work got a lot of public support he ended up getting so much support that the law was changed in the House of Commons the age of consent was risen an awareness went a long way to garnering awareness on this issue he was allowed to edit his newspaper from prison people like the pankhurst in the public would write him letters telling him how wonderful he was I think he very much saw his time in prison as a badge of honour we've got a photo as well of him of him wearing the uniform later in life on the anniversary of coming out of prison he would dress up in it and there's a great picture of him arm on the mantel piece in the full with the arrows on it kind of cartoon styley there he was proud of having prison a badge of honour but a very contentious figure who harnessed sensationalism and kind of married the high and the low the times elevated journalism with this kind of stories from the streets narrative he died a sensationalist death didn't he he died on the titanic I mean that's been a whole lot of sensationalised way to go incredible that phrase you just used harnessed sensationalism I want to talk about that because in my team in the cultural events team we talked about the title of this event which is obviously a sensationalist exploitative title blood sex crime click baity and we talked about complicity in the harnessing of sensationalism and how that works and to what extent it's important also to know that there is always a victim there has to be examine between us degrees of complicity in the harnessing of sensationalism who wants to go first popular you turned your back on it you were anti-sensationalist I tried as much as I possibly could I mean the really really difficult thing in writing a commercial book is that the cogs of publishing have to kick in and were in order to get books sold but I think we were quite careful about you know how this is a very good example of how initially the cover design was they had suggested that we use a picture from the police illustrated news which was of the murderer and I pushed back against that and I said I don't want that on here and I also didn't want the title the title was something like Jack the Ripper's women a nice no no we really have to think about how we struck to that how we use that because it doesn't work but you know I mean the thing is I think one has to be sensitive it's a really really difficult line to tell isn't it it is because people love to be tantalised delicious click baity sensation yeah yeah but it's how we do it and I'm you know I think marketing is so tough and again I think you know whether it's publishing whether it's anything one of the things that I worries me a lot about marketing and the structures of marketing is that it plays on our prejudices in order to sell things it can play on our darkest fears in the same way that the press does play on our darkest fears again can play on our prejudices and our unquestioned assumptions about things to give us what we want and have kind of insidious and and morally questionable and it's something we should all be aware of but it's in the modern world that we live in it's almost impossible to avoid coming into contact with that if you are in any form of if you're making a living commercially you know you try your best to be as ethical as you possibly can but there are a lot of things that are you know as authors kind of out of our control but I mean could you argue for example Graham you know people that buy books you know they're a sophisticated kind of people they know that you know you're playing games with them that there's multiple layers they're not all sophisticated but you know I don't know it's you know as an author it's hard to make a living as a writer and you do want to sell books you don't want to you don't want your books to you know to be sensationalised I mean it's interesting in a way the covers of our books are both very they use text and I was very keen to kind of text based cover using fonts of the time but then there's a very very old faded proof copy but there was these kind of bloody finger prints added to it which of course in a way is a very sensationalist touch it's as if you could actually do the same thing with your cover and when I first heard of this thought I was like I don't want bloody fingerprints on my book you know in both senses but actually you know it's the job of the cover to tell the reader something about about the contents of the book and as you mentioned this is a book that contains about a very violent incident I think the cover is I like the cover it does a good job but without going too far it's not a sort of axe a portrayal of a sort of axe wielding murderer sort of Jack the Ripper style silhouette around us so it's within the boundaries a good taste but there's certainly I mean within the sort of crime writing world of which I've got at least a food and in a way the whole crime fiction thing is perhaps an extension of what we're talking about you know it's the contemporary manifestation and true crime writing especially perhaps but there's certainly a big debate about the portrayal of the endless killing of women in crime novels and television both by male and female crime writers you know but I think that that debate is surprisingly new and it's very healthy that it's happening We've looked at the marketing and they're sort of packed with the devil but in terms of authorial intent your comments around stead and the fact that he used sensationalism to effect a great outcome, to effect a change in the law, you know can it be harnessed would you argue Shreveny that sensationalism can be harnessed for good I think so I mean the one thing that George et algey case actually did is again change the law because 1907 they brought in the criminal court of appeal and so that is thanks to this long suffering man because until then there was no way a convicted criminal had no choice but just to appeal to the home office which was like a wall even Arthur Conan Doyle founded this wall and a stitch up because everyone was related Exactly exactly it was all the pathway it was all everybody known to each other so yes and no but you know on the subject of how do you balance this I mean for this cover I did know that I did not want a dear stalker I did not want I didn't want the Sherlock Holmes brand like stamped on it and neither did they you know the blues I thought they really thought out of the box and just had this village scene you know these policemen totally inefficient and as you know as you know as you read the book so I was really happy with that Barcy lawyer was a debate because you know who knows Barcy's and I said if they don't know they'll just find out because you know I just wanted to put it there because him being Barcy was so important so for me that was quite important that I put that in the title so that was that but you have to I think at the end of the day you have to be honest about what you are saying in a book everything is in so many layers and you know that you want to take the reader on this journey but you want to also show them all the sides you have to you know see the village you have to see what happens see the crime and also you know put it in its context as it is now as well as see that there were still people there you know not just one sided there were still people who supported George and you do have to put that there was a petition signed by 10,000 people so you know you need to talk about those people who helped his mother you know she really helped his own helped so but the church didn't help you know I don't know why he didn't go to the church he's the vicar he never went to the church he never went to the parcies there was a party MP at the time and I couldn't figure out why he never went there so many unanswered questions but I think at the end of the day you have to be honest and just take them through the layers hopefully through the many layers Graham you touched on something there though and that brings us back to the early mention of Wilkie Collins and the woman in white and of the theme of mad women dead women abused women women in jeopardy there is a key ingredient here isn't there it's exactly what you've hit upon there's nearly always a woman and it's nearly always framed the woman is nearly always framed as a victim so I'm going to come to you let's unpack some of that why must sensationalism have that because women are seen as the weaker sex and I think certainly in the 19th century it plays to this idea that men have responsibility not only for women but for society for upholding society so there's almost a sort of setting an example this is what could happen and it's there's lots of things playing in this one is as we mentioned very early on about this idea women being responsible for their own murders you know what do you expect when when she's not being a good wife not being a good mother this is what happens and my god we had that all the way through to the Yorkshire River we still have that today the Suffolk Strangler as well must they always have a nickname oh god it's I mean yeah we have pressed to think that also because it sells newspapers if it bleeds it leads that's always and it's always been with us and you were mentioning tomorrow I was thinking about a lot of these 18th century confessional the gallows confessions and things like that we are obsessed with the criminal and often because we've become so obsessed with the criminal I think we further denigrate the victim the victim in many ways is like this stepping stone so the criminal can express their greatness and that was the case with Jack the Ripper as well it's like this idea that in the way in which he's been written about is like these women he was almost like this genius who expressed his genius who the murders of these women and then his escape without being caught and women can be there again in society to help facilitate the genius of a man in addition to being responsible for their own punishment and being the weak point in society and you know everything will always fall on the women's shoulders and then conversely making the society good again in the crime narrative falls on the male shoulder our crime narratives are almost always the male hero pursues the male villain and catches the male villain and makes it everything well for the world and that is that really underpins so much crime narrative that we have and it is about men making the world better for all of us Graham you've definitely got to be lured into criminal psychology I mean I'm totally interested in all that stuff and it's a completely unscientific anecdote I used to work in a huge boarder's bookshop in Glasgow called it stayed open until 11 o'clock at night and the night it was almost empty and just in front of the information desk was the true crime section and this was the early 2000s true crime with that true crime has become a bit more respectable as a genre now and there is some fantastic true crime writing that has always been but a lot of the stuff that was published then and probably still is very very pretty and very void is almost pornographic and most of these books are about deeply unpleasant things being done to women by men and yet what I find fascinating is the readership for this material seems to be predominantly female it is and I know this from talking to friends and so on as well so it's not scientific but it's an observation that a lot of women really enjoy reading about these very very unpleasant for one of the stronger work things being done to to women and that I'm curious about that there's a question rather than that they even write, well you know all these serial killers and they have these names always Jack the Ripper, Yorkshire Ripper, Charles Obrach the Bikini killer and then you have people actually writing to them if they're caught and they're in jail there was this incident, do you remember of this young Bangladesh woman who went and married, she was a divorcee she went and married Charles Bronson the most dangerous criminal in the jail, in the Milton Keynes jail they have groupies, a lot of these serial killers and goodness I mean then she was taking her daughter and the daughter was a bridesmaid and she was dressed in these red Indian bridal wear and the press obviously she was just covered and married this man and she said and she gave loads of interviews it was all horrible to read and you don't know why she did it but this fascination and then she said her daughter loved him and was calling him dad it just made you sick to this time well it ended I think in 2005 so that was that but it very much chimes with your earlier comment tomorrow about those early pamphlets very much in the same vein but that were particularly targeting a female readership and finding a female readership so there's nothing new here it's always been the case especially with novels as well I think there's always been a assumption that novels are very much a female readers realm that these narratives are written for women maybe placing women at the centre of action whether that be even though as a victim it's still they are being part of an extraordinary subversive event and I don't know whether there's a kind of free song by especially if you're a Victorian woman and there are very few options available in your life to see a woman portrayed in a realm or in a setting that would not be possible otherwise whether it be a kind of Bonnie and Clyde outlaw narrative or even to see grace of God it wasn't me narrative such as Jack the Ripper it's the most yes exactly it's seeing where you fear to tread representation but in a very warped way perhaps because there are fewer positive representations of women especially in that era I'm just pontificating here now even now all of us saw these two murders of the women three murders actually that happened the two sisters in memory maybe this happened just over the last two years during lockdown and we know how the police took photographs next to the bodies it's still happening this sort of misogyny everything is and race because they took them two days to even come to this look for them so a more respectable a lot more respectable because the two sisters were partying because there was a lockdown I mean everybody downing street may have been partying there but these four girls had to go to a park and sit there and have a birthday party and there were all these questions being asked why were they there so late it's still very much there isn't there fault isn't there fault it's always is it her fault it's always her fault I want to look at the history of celebrity which I know you've studied as well to what extent that's another key ingredient and is it sort of a co-dependency between celebrity and sensationalism wow I think so we've got a few examples of the illustrated police news in the exhibition the other one is very much the trial of Oscar Wilde so Oscar Wilde was on trial for having sexual relationships with men something that wouldn't be a scandal now that wouldn't make the news but in more of a celebrity context you've got that splashed across the front of the illustrated papers showing him in the docks there are images as well of the public thronging the courts he can't get out of his carriage to go into courts to add that name being given to this act or this event that's outside of the normal so to add that name as well as the excitement of the other I think it becomes a media circus it's a storm it's an explosive event in that way there's a key part that this is what happened to Jack the Ripper he has become a celebrity even though we'll never know who he or she or they were is it possible they were a she or are they um it's you know there's always an outside possibility but I mean we're just never ever going to know we're never going to know do you think the notoriety of this figure has continued because with the serial killers we know the Peter South Cliffs the Dennis Nales when they are discovered and we find out that they are mere mortals they are ordinary men somebody's brother somebody's son in the title of Gordon Burns excellent book we've never known who this person was the myth is perpetuating the sensationalist myth can go on in a way that it can with Peter South Cliffs because he's just a lorry driver well I think there's you know and again this was this was very much part of the coverage in the 19th century that it was it was such a mystery how first of all who he was how he got away from these crime scenes that you know they started to kind of embellish and embroider well is this supernatural you know there was this kind of supernatural element coming into it and I think that is partially responsible for the persistence of this and the reason why you know come every halloween you can dress up as Dracula and Frankenstein in Jack the Ripper Jack the Ripper was a real person he wasn't a monster but somehow he's entered the realm of monster and then you know on top of that then we get Seraphicon and Doyle and we get Sherlock Holmes really just happening almost right at the same time so we get this whole mythologised London and this mythologised you know dark streets full of fog and they kind of become one they fuse and so fact and fiction you know there's no resolution here in so many ways I think this would be a great point to turn to the audience and see if there's any questions here or also I want to ask my colleague Jonah if there's any questions coming from our online audience anybody want to ask anybody a question that's one here I was just wondering with all the kind of fiction and sedentationism around such a massive hate where did you go to find the truth where did you manage to find them I just want to repeat this back for the audiences online that might not have heard it so the audience member asked Halle where you went with so much fiction online around this case how did you dig down to the archives and in fact I mean the interesting thing is the one if you're looking for a basis a historical basis from which to tell the story you look at the biographical touch points of these women's lives so things that you'll find in documents so you know birth, death and marriages censuses I mean gosh censuses are the most incredible I could wax lyrical about the censuses and fairies I know it's just like oh historians gold it's just like pure fact pure infat well actually I should be very careful about the term fact because one of the things we do as historians is we're constantly questioning what is a fact and a fact is a movable feast so this idea that things are facts historians don't deal with facts we actually deal with arguments we deal with context around things but looking specifically at this if you look at biographical detail which is what I was doing you can get so much more information and we are very fortunate in that this is a wonderful data set for a historian that's one of the reasons why I chose these five women is because we do have press coverage of ordinary people's lives and they did interview family members and they did interview people who knew them although that information is perhaps a little bit cloudy it gives you something to go on you can drill into it and then you can reconstruct it and then what I did you know I'm using these women's lives as a sort of way in which we can access an almost every woman's experience a poor Victorian womanhood and so layer on experiences that other women would have had so for example if Catherine Edo's gave birthing Great Ymwyth Workhouse in the 1860s we may not have her voice or her experience but we have somebody else's of what it was like and it would have been a very very similar experience and so you can draw the outlines of a life and so that's how I was able to do it thank you I want to unless people have got questions I've got many more of my own although there are a couple do we have some from online Jonah? Yes we do I've got one from Roger fired the Living Knowledge Network I've always felt that a fascination with dangerous stuff was driven by our genes and evolution as cavemen we needed to give special notice to dangers and predators in order to avoid being eaten or killed and to survive individually and as a species do you agree? Quiet The biological determinism argument in a way that argument might go to why do women like to read about other women being killed because they think by reading this material they will better protect themselves or they can take measures because it's their fault so it's up to them to avoid it I really agree I think there are kind of dark I think the sort of prurience that people feel about reading this material is more of where I would come from I think people feel a sort of freeson in reading about things that we're not supposed to read about and acts that we're not supposed to be interested in so I think my view of why people like this material is maybe a bit baser and less biological So I'm very interested in that point thanks for that question I'm sure other people might have a different view But just to elaborate on a little bit this idea of the sort of base the thrill Do you think that's changed across the centuries is it still the same? I see no reason to think that it's changed you know when Marquis de Sade was in his cell writing his curisome horrible books and yet he has his fans even now and now we have this fashion for true crime so I don't really see I think it's fairly consistent Do you tomorrow having spent so long arranging the break in the news exhibition do you think that we are differently shocked similarly shocked or just always the overton window of discourse around sensationalism has it stayed in roughly the same place? I mean I'm going to head to my best and I think it's a bit of both I think there is that need to know what's going on and to know about the dangers that's almost kind of biological impulse why did disasters always make the news and things like that but then there is absolutely that interest that entertainment value as well perhaps I mean it's only really recently that we have had a deluge of entertainment I mean for a lot of it I would say that these Netflix documentaries as well they are a good example of modern sensationalism but even throughout history when you are just looking at newspapers or even the pamphlets like witchcraft pamphlets from the 17th century there is still there's that exciting offered kind of narrative you want to know about the people who aren't like you who are wrong you want to know that you're right and they're wrong kind of thing so yeah I think that's a huge part of it and has always been I think what they say about these Netflix and all these other streaming services the true crime documentaries are so popular and they also say that it's because then people you know we can think eh there's the voyeurism that's big definitely and also we can sit apart you know we can sit in our living rooms and look at this world which is not ours and we can discuss this with us in our sanitised surroundings with our friends so that is also a part of it but I think one thing has changed is that the narrative more and more people are objecting to the emphasis being on the killer and not the victim because I know there was a lot of criticism there's a new one called staircase and they are saying that it is why are they just focusing so much on the man who is suspected of this murder other than the victim so there's been some which is a healthy change so yeah let's hope they evolve Does it matter whether it's drama whether it's journalism or Netflix does that play a role at all can you get away with more in a novel Faye? I hope so because you're always good in the case of making a unit it's made up whereas obviously if you're writing non-fiction you are bound I would imagine most non-fiction writer of an obligation and a desire to be as not to the facts but to interpret what information is available in a sort of with some fidelity I mean even with his bloody project I wanted it to be as accurate historically accurate as possible in terms of the milieu and so on and the lives of people led but of course I can just make up the narrative elements and the characters so I don't know Next questions there was a few do keep your hand up so that we can bring the microphone around Why is Lee Byfield getting married again? Who's Lee Byfield? He's the bloke who murdered three women he's a Milton Keynes jail and he's going through the nuptials now and he's getting married again You tell us why he's getting married again I'm asking the question you're the expert This is a mystery to me so is it connected into that sort of fetishisation of murderous men is that what you're hinting at? I know it's more about the attitude of women I mean this man's murder three women decides she's the life of his life and now she's going to marry him and there's something funny going on Yeah there's definitely something funny going on I mean I don't think anybody would disagree with you except maybe the woman marrying him I mean I I don't know but I know I mean it's extraordinary how serial killers and killers have these kind of cult followings and the types of women who are attracted to them I could not I could not vouch for it I mean I'm probably speaking for everybody here I'm sure you have your own thoughts but I can't imagine that that person is of sound mind to want to do that I am not a criminologist I could not begin to give an explanation as to why a woman would want to marry a serial killer I'm sure criminologists could though Do you think there might have been happy? Who the woman marrying a serial killer? We're speculating there but I think maybe this is the book that you should write Yes Clearly it's caught your imagination and we don't seem to be able to afford you with an answer on that one but thank you I'm going to have a question, your question please Why is it that women have been shown interest and sensationalism or true crime? Do you think it's actually all to do with the way or why women really want to find out things and much more curious Is this a detail? Why are things being worked out that way? Are women more curious? Women read more books I mean that's just a fact Women read more, they buy more books Most books are bought by women I don't know the exact data but that's definitely true Are they a more curious reader? I don't know, have you writers observed a deeper level of engagement from your female readership? Graham The book groups predominantly that I've been to are almost entirely made up of women female readers when I go to book festivals I certainly get more engagement from female readers but I think more women read novels than men so that's just maybe just the law of averages but I don't know whether it's a curiosity or maybe maybe men we like facts no point messable Noel Gallacher Noel Gallacher is a man and said yesterday what a waste of time reading novels and I was like I don't know maybe you've got points Noel Gallacher said novels are a waste of time but maybe men are but more or less open to speculative stuff made up stuff things that are not in the realm of absolutely fine I don't know, do you have an opinion? Well I think that the concept that women have always been like this back then they read the Penny Dreadfuls or whatever the newspapers you're talking about and now is it women more women who are consuming sensationist, true crime work now why is that? There must be something that makes us want to be inquisitive about it or understand more about it or try to get to the bottom of it I mean by trying to actually understand it what it is that really happened and that's just a thought Thank you Would anyone else like to respond there's a question here and a question here at the front and another one here they're coming thick and fast we've only got three minutes make them very quick please if you can you bring the microphone there could you bring the microphone here so that we don't waste time so one here and one there Do you want to go first because you've got the microphone I was sort of really going to make a comment because it's interesting that the focus is on the men who are criminals but in the 1860s there are very high profiled women killers and in Lady Audie's secret she is of course the woman who attempts murder so I just thought it was interesting that women were equally interested in women killers and supportive when we go to the trials so I think it's maybe more a power thing than necessarily that relationship between men and women I'm not personally interested in those sort of Although I'm not sure everybody that went along to the trials was supporting there was a sort of ghoulish element to that Not necessarily but I think from my reading there was support there so that's quite an interesting perspective and it's not always about the men killers so I just thought I'd say it's not like that Can I just make a quick comment on that I mean the big sensationalist case in Scotland in the late 1850s was the Madeleine Smith case there was upper middle class merchant class poisoned allegedly poisoned her lover this was an absolutely enormously sensational case in Scotland and one where the alleged poisoner was female I'm sorry I haven't got a question but I think something about why women like to read novels and like sensationalism because I think it's kind of gives them the freedom because women's lives are quite limited or have been in the past and quite humdrum looking at the sensationalism reading novels and everything gives them a form of escape it's a bit like why do girls love horses it's because it gives them I'm sorry a wonderful lecture about this woman in the book called why do girls love horses it's because it gives them the ability to escape to be free that's my theory Can I just contribute to that some of the research I'm doing right now is looking at some fiction that was written in the late 19th century that feature when women just enter into office work as secretaries and telefonists and typists and shorthand writers and suddenly there was this whole genre of like the woman typist who goes on an adventure and is caught up on her bicycle in her rational dress and is caught up in international scandal and evil men who she works for and she's running after trains it's extraordinary but that speaks to what you're saying about the limited women's limited lives and as soon as women get an opportunity to kind of break from their limited lives then there's all sorts of excitement and embellishment and imagination happening Talking of excitement and embellishment and imagination happening I urge you to read these amazing books The Mystery of the Parsi Lawyer by Shrevely Basu His Bloody Project by Graham McCrae Burnett by Hallie Thank you very much for being here and I'd like you to give a huge round of applause to my brilliant Tamara Tub also and my brilliant panel Thank you very much for joining us today Thank you