Kate ColquhounBesprekingen

Compared sometimes unfavourably with the Suspicions of Mr Wicher but this is a good book in its own right. Well researched and written.

I read the first the first few chapters, and than lost interest. I don't think it was bad writing or anything, just a bit bland. It may have become more interesting if I continued with it, but I have a pile of unread books, so I'm giving up.

This book started out very interesting, but it got somewhat tiresome by the time I got to the end. It is the story of the first murder in a railway private car in England. The manhunt comes all the way to the United States during the Civil War. As another commenter I read pointed out, the book's author makes a better case than the British Crown representatives ever did with the man accused of the crime.

Readers who enjoy Victorian crime fiction may like this book. Readers of true crime books may like it as well. The book at moments reads like a crime fiction novel. It was also interesting because you get a lot of insights into Victorian society, especially the press of the time. I will say this: Nancy Grace and her ilk of vultures have nothing on Victorian newspapers. The press pretty much made it a sport to condemn the man, often with little evidence, in order to sell papers. As I said, the modern crime vultures on TV who try cases on the court of public opinion have nothing on those folks.

The reason I did not rate it higher is that the book does get a bit tiresome, especially during the trial stage. Some things do get a bit repetitive, and you find yourself skimming a bit, especially since you know how things will end. And in the end, you get a summary of how the case did help shape some laws later.

So, for me, it was an ok book. For others, it may be a good find.

This was a fascinating biography of Joseph Paxton, who began as a working-class gardener on a country estate and ended up designing the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition and serving as Member for Parliament. Kate Colquhoun has little to say about Joseph Paxton's origins, because the details are sketchy, but once he's older, he apprentices at the Horticultural Society, and then he is hired as head gardener by William Cavendish, Sixth Duke of Devonshire. Paxton was an intelligent, enthusiastic man whose enthusiasms fed into a positive feedback loop with the Duke. Basically, anything Paxton wanted to do with the estate, the Duke would pay for. They amassed a huge collection of orchids, racing others to cultivate and flower species new to England. Paxton got the first Victoria regia (a giant water lily several meters wide) to flower, and was also the first person to cultivate a banana in England. The bananas we eat today are the Cavendish bananas, named after Paxton's patron.

Paxton taught himself architecture to build new glasshouses for the Duke's collection, and he put in a proposal for the building to house the Great Exhibition. This thrust him into the national spotlight, and soon he was designing public parks, on the boards of railway corporations, standing for Parliament, creating a daily newspaper edited by Charles Dickens, and organizing relief efforts in the Crimea! Colquhoun's account of his rise is a fascinating look at a fascinating life, and she peppers the book with little human details ably, especially the stories of Paxton and the Duke's appreciation for each other and for plant life. Their enthusiasm for rare plants is infectious even through the printed page. I loved her accounts of Victoria's two visits to the Duke's estate, one as a young princess, one with Albert in tow. The Duke of Wellington thought Paxton's gardeners so well organized that he said Paxton would have made a good general!

Arguably, the Victorian period was the first time we really became conscious that we were moving into the future, and Paxton was one of the people trying to design that future. "The Busiest Man in England" is a great story in itself, and also filled with connections to other stories of the nineteenth century: I was pleased to see, for example, that Jane Loudon (author of The Mummy!: A Story of the Twenty-Second Century) got a couple mentions, and Paxton's life brought him into contact with Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Tenniel, and many other familiar names. A nice personal story from my favorite period of history.

Un excellent ouvrage d'histoire concrète. Un crime / une enquête / un coupable / une traque / un procès... et ?½

This was so interesting. I loved the writing style. It made it seem as if you were reading a murder mystery. It was very interesting to see the police methods of the time. They really were very limited.

this book was so well written and brought all the relevant people to life. I still doubt Muller's guilt. I think that he was a wrong person at the wrong place.

This is a true crime story. I gave it almost 100 pages, but just couldn't get past the dry delivery of details. It's just not my kind of mystery.

An entertaining and informative, relatively well paced narrative, describing not the crime, trial and execution of a criminal involved in the first ever rail way murder in the British Isles. Interesting and intriguing at times, it revealed a lot of the inconsistencies in Victorian England and society. Good, but not going to tell the ardent Victorian scholar anything new about the period.

Undoubtedly a fascinating late Victorian murder trial, but I feel that this book takes this popular mini-genre a step too far. Firstly, I found the lengthy novelistic descriptive passages irritating. If you want to turn a real life case into a novel then do so (as was done successfully with 'A Pin to See the Peepshow) but if you're writing popular history, stick to the facts.
Secondly, this is another example of a book in severe need of a good editor. It's about 100 pages too long. The author's musings on the position of middle class women, their unhappy marriages and public attitudes to their sexual behaviour are interesting but repeated several times in the book. Thirdly, the trial itself lacks tension because of the lengthy and repetitive detail of all the medicines/poisons administered or not .
Since it's obvious from the start that the author doesn't think Florence Maybrick murdered her husband, the book would have been better titled 'Will they find her guilty?'.
Having said all that, it's not a bad read - especially when explaining the extraordinary range of semi-lethal medicines available to hypochondriac Victorians containing strychnine, arsenic, opium or cocaine.

In 1864, a train's first-class carriage was discovered to be empty of passengers but liberally smeared in blood. Some hours later, the original occupant was found--dead, his body discarded near the train tracks. The police tracked his stolen top hat and watch chain through the pawn shops of London, and quickly zeroed in on a suspect: a poor German tailor. But by the time they discovered his identity, Franz Müller had already gotten on a ship to America (currently in the throes of their Civil War). The lead detective tracked him down and, though there was some political & legal trouble over the extradition (both sides in America wishing for more aid from the UK at the time, and insulted that they weren't getting it), brought him back to London for a swift trial. On the basis of his owning a hat and watch chain that were probably the banker's, Müller was convicted of murder and hanged.

This is mostly useful in revealing the types of investigative, journalistic, and legal procedures of the time. The detectives were hampered by being a fairly new profession (established only twenty-two years earlier), and still without the ability to even definitively tell animal blood from human. So instead, they mostly relied on evidence that modern courts would call circumstantial. Meanwhile, the papers went mad for this murder, to the extent that mobs waited for hours for the chance to see Müller. And in terms of the trial, the accused was not allowed to speak in his own defense, and trials were customarily very short.

The truth of what truly happened that night in 1864 may never be known--certainly Colquhoun doesn't really know. So for readers looking for a murder mystery, this might feel a little dissatisfying. But as a snap-shot of mid-Victorian English justice, it's fascinating.

An absolutely fantastic history of food in England, beginning in the Stone Age up through the ages as the British learned to cook and refine ingredients.

This story was satisfying in the way it was researched, and frustrating in that Florence is convicted based on her sexuality more than her guilt of murder. One would like to believe that in today's courts that a woman could not be convicted on such evidence. It seems to me there just wasn't enough proof to even establish that her husband James was murdered, let alone by Florence.

I think I would recommend this book for people who enjoy a historical research novel, and those who are passionate about women's issues and the progression of women's rights.

Well I still don't know. The author presents all the evidence from the time and some that came out later and still doesn't know. Her husband didn't display all the symptoms of Arsenic poisoning, and in fact he was taking Arsenic before that as a medicine, he seems to have been a hypochondriac and is possibly a good example of fatal drug interactions, leading to death.

Florence Maybrick was a southern belle, whose mother brought her to England to find a husband, which she did. James Maybrick was older than her and his servants didn't really like her, so when another man showed her some affection she embraced a chance at love. This didn't work and then suddenly her husband becomes ill and begins a marathon illness where her care was questioned and suspicions of murder build.

During the case there was a lot of emphasis on her adultery, making her dishonest and makes the judge convinced of her guilt. His competence is later questioned.

Interesting real-life murder mystery with no solution.½

A riveting story of a famous British criminal trial -- I read it in 2 evenings.

It might seem trite to say so but this book is a delicious read. Through beautifully written prose the author takes the reader on a comprehensive review of British history through its food, fashions in eating and cookery.

It helps if you are already a history reader and have some additional knowledge of the periods and characters from history that Kate uses to illustrate her points (including those of my beloved Pepys) and of the culinary art itself. But even read as a straightforward historical account it is a valuable read.

Highly recommended.

The telling of the murder, the suspects, the witnesses, the evidence (or lack thereof), etc. were all interesting aspects of the story. But I began to skim about two-thirds of the way through due to the repetitiveness of this same information. That this is based on an actual happening appealed to me. Wanting to learn the outcome without just jumping to the last few pages, I did finish the book but it wasn't as captivating for me as I had hoped.

Narrazione precisa, accurata di un famoso fatto di sangue avvenuto su un treno a Londra nel 1864 e del successivo processo. Molto interessante la descrizione del sistema giudiziario e procedurale inglese. Si legge come un romanzo!

Comprehensive look at British history through its food. This does a good job of explaining how different events and societal influences affected what food was available, and has plenty of details and footnotes. The one major flaw is that there is so much information that I sometimes found it hard to keep track of which foods were popular when.½

I must admit to a certain initial prejudice against purchasing this book because, having read the blurb, it seemed to me an attempt to cash in on the success of Kate Summerscale's excellent 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher'. Indeed Jack Whicher is mentioned in these pages as a contemporary of the detective Inspector Richard Tanner who is the chief investigator of the murder of Thomas Briggs in a Victorian railway carriage, the subject of Kate Colquhon's book. It's certainly true that the Colquhon story covers the same period of history, tracks the investigation of a real-life high-profile murder and treats its subject in a very similar style to Kate Summerscale, but I came to the conclusion that I couldn't blame the author for the publisher's opportunism and that her own credentials were anyway impeccable. So I bought the book.

I'm glad I did. As with 'Mr Whicher' I was transported to mid-Victorian England and was as thoroughly engaged with the murder, the investigation, the chase, trial and aftermath as newspaper readers of the time obviously were, though Colquhon writes with far more restraint than many of those journalists covering the story. Ms Colquhoun's admirable research allows us not only to become steeped in the details of the case but also to have a tangible sense of the lived context, with plenty of rich descriptive background to place the reader in the territory. We do hear the occasional riffle of research notes but in general the learning is presented subtly and in tune with the narrative.

Tanner is not brought to life as effectively as Summerscale's Whicher, but the difficult-to-pin-down Francis Muller - the supposed villain of the piece - is very carefully drawn in all his ambiguities.

This being real life, there is no fully realised close-the-book resolution, but Colquhon makes that a strength of her book, particularly in the final chapters. I won't say more than that, not wishing to give too much of the game away, but I do warn readers not to take too close a look at the picture captions before you've finished the narrative, otherwise you will discover more than you may wish to know at that point.

I truly enjoy these out of the ordinary slightly unusual historical tales.
This first murder in a railcar had many very extraordinary circumstances and the author has done excellent research and laid out the investigations, discoveries, court proceedings in a chronological basis and gives you as much info as possible.
But it got to be too much for me - felt like I was slogging through the same info, recountings again and again and again . . .
I know this is what happens in crime solving - facts that seem the same, info that has been heard previously takes on a different slant, witnesses change slightly, and there were no clear cut absolutes.
I only wonder if this could have been told somehow in a shorter version - I was hoping for a 'story' that I could read, not a crime that I had to solve, and so it became a struggle for me.

Rather than being a well written and researched piece of work, this is simply a compendium of other books- one long quotation after another. It is interesting, but it quickly gets tedious as well. I think some explanation worked in amongst the excerpts would have made it more palatable. Ouch.

Rather than being a well written and researched piece of work, this is simply a compendium of other books- one long quotation after another. It is interesting, but it quickly gets tedious as well. I think some explanation worked in amongst the excerpts would have made it more palatable. Ouch.

I have been fascinated by the idea of a murder occurring on a train ever since Murder on the Orient Express. Being a true crime buff, because truth is often stranger than fiction, and also a fan of Victorian London, I thought this would be right up my alley. In truth it was very dry, like week old toast dry. Not even butter and jelly could have saved it.

The novel relates the true tale of poor Mr. Briggs. One night while heading home on a train he never reaches his destination. All that is left behind is a hat, not his, and his bloody railway car. He is soon located but is mortally wounded and unable to describe his assailant. Through some dogged detective work and circumstantial evidence a likely suspect is found but he is able to flee before the net is closed. The chase is on and the book goes on to lay out the facts of the case.

While some interesting facts were presented, the author repeated herself a lot. It was clear from the copious notes in the back that the author did her research but the detectives conclusions were repeated in the trial portion of the book too closely. In addition the book suffered from the case itself not being very interesting. As far as I could make out it seemed that Mr. Briggs was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The motive for the crime was rather murky and I don't think fully established. If the killer had been tried today any lawyer worth his salt would have gotten the defendant off based on the case as it was presented here. Since there wasn't any forensic evidence tested like it would be today, the true guilt of the person who murdered Mr. Briggs can never fully be determined which is a draw back to the book.

This kind of true crime historical novel is the type that author Erik Larson does so well. I just don't think there was enough of a story here for a whole novel and the additional information added in for padding was not interesting enough for anything but a brief skimming over or putting you to sleep.