![]() ![]() The killing had more concrete effects, too. Colquhuon explains that the case led to changes in train-safety regulations and new rights for criminal defendants. “What the country wanted was superhuman sagacity and ingenuity on the part of their police force, for heroism that would confirm that they were protected.” ![]() “The murder had occasioned a public clamour for detective success, for evil to be contained and order reimposed,” Colquhoun writes. It’s about how the case came to transfix Londoners and what that obsession said about the zeitgeist. Relying largely on primary sources, Kate Colquhoun’s “ Murder in the First-Class Carriage” sketches the moves of London detectives as they worked to solve the case and bring the perpetrator to justice. It reads like a 19th-century version of a “Law & Order” episode, with every break in the case making the reader wonder which witnesses are fallible, which leads are worth following, and what clues the police may have missed or botched. It adds up to a suspenseful, well-paced account of a baffling mystery.īut Colquhoun’s book isn’t just about the investigation. ![]() The 1864 murder set in motion an investigation that captured the public imagination and became the subject of chatter in living rooms and taverns across Britain. Soon after, authorities found the body of banker Thomas Briggs lying near the train tracks. ’Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing’ by Kate Colquhoun (The Overlook Press) ![]()
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