Crime

Saturday

Nigel Jones

The gentrification of British crime novels

Eighty years ago this month, in February 1946, the left-wing Tribune magazine published George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ in which the writer identified a certain class of crime as most appealing to the tabloid-reading British public – and contrasted the ‘cosiness’ of this type of early 20th-century domestic murder with the brutal sadism of killings committed in Britain during the second world war.  Two years previously, in 1944, while war still raged, in another essay entitled ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Orwell specifically contrasted the ‘hard-boiled’ school of crime fiction with the gentlemanly Raffles stories of E.W. Hornung, featuring a well-mannered upper-crust jewel thief. He linked the noir fiction exemplified by James Hadley Chase in his novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish with the vicious

Tuesday

Amanda Craig

Horror in Victorian Hampstead: Mrs Pearcey, by Lottie Moggach, reviewed

Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star and living with her widowed mother in Camden Square; and impoverished Mary Pearcey, who lodges in a Hampstead boarding house and is accused of the grotesque murder of a woman and her baby. It was a celebrated case in its day, coming soon after the Ripper murders, and it is now revived in Moggach’s vivid,

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Am I a libertarian after all?

I have never been the greatest fan of libertarianism as a political ideology. Libertarians seem to me to be the bisexuals of politics – they want a bit of everything. But even I felt a slight twinge of libertarian sentiment this week when I read some remarks by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Labour minister had told MPs that artificial intelligence is an ‘incredibly powerful tool that can and should be used by our police forces’, though she added that it must be regulated in a way that is ‘always accurate’. I have never before read the words ‘police’ and ‘always accurate’ in the same sentence, so the novelty

Wednesday

James Heale

What's the future of the Scottish Tories?

19 min listen

The leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Russell Findlay MSP, sits down with James Heale to look ahead to May’s pivotal Holyrood elections. He pushes back against the threat from Reform, arguing that Nigel Farage is trying to be ‘all things to all people’, and he is scathing about the lack of loyalty shown by those who have defected from the party – not just to Reform, but to the Liberal Democrats too. But with the collapse of the support Labour received in the 2024 general election – which Findlay calls their ‘loveless landslide’ – why aren’t the Tories benefitting more? Plus, how did being the victim of a vicious acid

Lawrence Newport

Crime in London is worse than Khan admits

‘Whatever your business in London is’, claimed the capital’s police chief Mark Rowley yesterday, ‘we’re creating a safe environment for you to thrive.’ In fact, he argued, London is an ‘extraordinarily safe global city’. For his part in Monday’s media blitz, Mayor Sadiq Khan wrote in the Guardian that ‘Londoners are safer in their homes and on our streets.’ This analysis is at best extremely misleading – at worst, it is deliberately ignorant of the experiences and concerns shared by Londoners and visitors alike. Indeed, the facts suggest quite the opposite of Mayor Khan and Commissioner Rowley’s comments. Recent statistics show that our capital is experiencing a theft epidemic. The

Monday

Stuart Kelly

A supernatural western: Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielowski, reviewed

Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating. The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’. The

Thursday

Julie Burchill

The art of owning up

Though Rebecca Culley is obviously a wrong ’un – having stolen £90,000 from her dear old gramps while pretending to care for him and only spend a minimum of his cash on ‘bits and bobs’ – I couldn’t help feeling a flash of admiration for her. When she was caught bang to rights, she diagnosed herself as a ‘spoilt brat’. At last, a person with lousy personality traits – in this case acquisitiveness, laziness and dishonesty – has refused to reach for some bogus medical synonym to justify their behaviour and has used words which all of us can read and think: ‘Yep, sounds about right.’ In return the judge

Thursday

The Spectator

How many illegal migrants does Britain return?

Condemned leaders Former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, for using lethal force against student protests last year. But on past records, she might yet live to an advanced age. The last national leader to be executed was Saddam Hussein in 2006, during the Allied occupation of Iraq. Other leaders sentenced to death in their country’s courts have fared better: — Emile Derlin Zinsou, installed as president of Dahomey (now Benin) after a coup in 1968, was sentenced to death in 1975. That was rescinded and he returned to Benin in 1990. He died aged 98 in 2016. — Chun Doo-hwan, who led

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

A Faustian pact: The School of Night, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

The fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spooky supernatural series differs from the others in that it is a standalone and doesn’t involve previous characters. Gone, too, are the multiple narrators; and there is only the briefest mention of a new star in the sky – which in the other three books coincided with all sorts of inexplicable occurrences. But it is no less compelling. This is the story of an arrogant young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who arrives in London in 1985 to study photography at a prestigious art college. Though enthusiastic about his subject, he finds it hard to accept the constructive criticism of his lecturers. He is single-minded

Thursday

The Spectator

How popular is the British royal family?

Austere environment Who introduced the word ‘austerity’ into the political lexicon? While chiefly associated with attacks on the Conservatives, and subsequently Reform UK, by Labour and other left-wing parties, it was David Cameron who brought the word back into common parlance. In a speech to the Conservative party forum on 26 April 2009 he declared: ‘The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.’ He went on to say: ‘We’ve made it clear that a Conservative government would spend less than Labour. We’re not frightened of their idiotic ritual chants about “cuts”.’ An analysis by the LSE found that in the election year of 2010, right-leaning thinktanks

Mary Wakefield

We have to stop looking away

I learnt not to intervene on a late summer’s afternoon nine years ago. My son was still a baby and I was pushing him in his pram across a busy road in a responsible way, only after the green ‘walk’ man had lit up. I was about halfway over when a boy of about 14 on a moped scorched through the lights and past us, nearly hitting the pram. I yelled at him, and as I yelled felt the spirit of civic duty rise within me. If we middle-aged mothers don’t set the kids straight, who will? The boy skidded to a stop and turned to face me. I can’t

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Rachel Reeves’s Budget ‘bollocks’ & Britain’s everyday crime crisis

48 min listen

To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, go to: spectator.co.uk/quiteright This week on Quite right!: Rachel Reeves goes on the offensive – and the defensive. After her surprise Downing Street address, Michael and Maddie pick over the many kites that have been flying in advance of the Budget at the end of the month. Was she softening the public up for tax rises, or trying to save her own job? Michael explains why Reeves is wrong to say that Labour’s inheritance is the reason for our current economic misfortune and says that it is ‘absolute bollocks’ that Brexit is to blame. Next, a chilling weekend of violence sparks

Thursday

Toby Young

Goodbye and good riddance to ‘non-crime’

The congratulatory messages started pouring in shortly after 5.30 p.m. on Monday. The Metropolitan Police had just issued a press release saying that the force would no longer investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and people were chalking this up as a victory for the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run. That may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Met linked the decision to its failed pursuit of Graham Linehan, the comedy writer it arrested at Heathrow airport in September over three tweets taking the piss out of trans-rights activists. It was thanks in part to the FSU, which pulled together Graham’s legal team, that the Met decided

Monday

G.V. Chappell

How bad do things have to get before the police show up?

Earlier this year, I wrote here about the arsonist who’d left our neighbourhood looking post-apocalyptic. In the months that followed, the pyromaniac grew ever more reckless. Initially, he’d stuck to torching vehicles on the road, which was bad enough. But then he took it a step further. He set fire to a car on a driveway, which in turn set the house alight. The young family, who were asleep upstairs, escaped with their lives, but their home was destroyed. A collection was started, and we dropped in some cash. The organiser said that in 20 years in the area, he’d never seen things as bad as they were now. He’d

Thursday

David Shipley

The civil service is killing restorative justice

Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference. The latest organisation to be banned from prisons is Sycamore Tree, a Christian charity which arranges meetings between prisoners and people who have been the victims of similar crimes to those they committed. It charged prisons nothing and had operated successfully for more than 25 years, running courses for more than 40,000 prisoners. The story of its banning was broken by

Thursday

Toby Young

What we can learn from Singapore

I was in Australia last week, having been invited to give the annual oration by the Robert Menzies Institute, and stopped off in Singapore on the way home. I’ve always been curious about this Southeast Asian city state, having read so much about Lee Kuan Yew, its Cambridge–educated founding father, who holds the record of being the world’s longest-serving prime minister. When he assumed office in 1959, Singapore was a fading outpost of the British Empire, seemingly destined to be swallowed up by one of its larger neighbours. The population was impoverished, illiterate and riven with racial conflict. It had no natural resources and most of its 224 square miles

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Crime and no punishment in Khan’s London

Those of us trapped in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s low traffic neighbourhood scheme are now obedient, resigned. We expect a car journey of under a mile to take 40 minutes. We don’t hope for anything more. On Sunday, around five o’clock, my son and I stuck fast in Dalston Lane, but as we settled down to wait in a mist of carbon monoxide, there was a commotion up ahead. Down the wrong side of the road, horn blaring, lights flashing, came a Mercedes G-wagon, matt black with that handy snorkel up the side, the favourite ride of north London’s gangsters. It was interesting how calm everyone was about it, how unsurprised.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Shallow and silly: Born With Teeth, at Wyndham's Theatre, reviewed

Born With Teeth is a camp two-hander starring a pair of TV luminaries, Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel, as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The year is 1591 and the great dramatists are holed up in a tavern working on an early draft of Henry VI (Part 3). Not much writing gets done. It’s all rhetoric and bombast. Marlowe is a bullying egomaniac who boasts of his ‘throbbing quill’ and parades a peacock’s feather which he strokes lasciviously. Both playwrights are gay, of course, and they live in a world that views heterosexual couplings as a mystifying aberration. Marlowe prances about on the table and re-enacts his conquests of grateful gay aristocrats.

Thursday

Max Jeffery

How volunteer groups are taking the place of our absent police

Chris Hargreaves used to be a wellness coach with a promising future in reality television. In 2023, he starred in E4’s Big Celebrity Detox and tried to cleanse Kerry Katona’s soul with piñón blanco seeds. Today, he leads The Shield: a private volunteer police force of hundreds of officers. They plan to begin patrolling Britain’s streets imminently. Hargreaves and his team regard Britain as a place of increasing lawlessness. Many would agree. Shoplifting is at record highs, prosecutions are near record lows and people are asking where the authorities have gone. According to a poll by Merlin Strategy for The Spectator, only around half of British people have spoken to

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Bring back the hotel bath!

Moore problems Sir: Many years ago a colleague warned me that I was so impossibly uncool that one day I was bound to become hip. Has this moment arrived? Charles Moore (Notes, 23 August) informs me that there is a ‘currently fashionable conservatism’ which is ‘militantly against Ukraine’. By this he presumably means not regarding Ukraine as a sort of lovely Narnia, full of birdsong, democracy and honesty, which – as it happens – it isn’t. Even so, I wonder where this ‘fashionable conservatism’ is to be found? After more than a decade of suggesting the Ukraine issue is not as simple as many believe, I have – as far