Murder

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

The tragedy of trusting Stuart Hazell with Tia Sharp

The Tia Sharp case is yet another harrowing untermensch saga. The man accused of the little girl’s murder, Stuart Hazell, has now changed his plea to guilty. Of course, it is impossible not to feel anguish for Tia’s parents. Just as it is impossible to comprehend their agony. Whatever the ins and outs, and whatever point I make below. Tia’s dad has expressed a wish that Hazell should serve a long time in prison and then be hanged. Fair enough, I suppose. I would probably think the same if it was my kid. Tia’s mum, Natalie, meanwhile has castigated Hazell: ‘I gave the ultimate trust to Stuart.’  By which she

Thursday

George Chamier

Killing as entertainment

‘The history of our love affair with violence’ is how Michael Newton describes his new book, Age of Assassins. In fact, its scope is much narrower: assassination in Europe and the US from the murder of Lincoln in 1865 to the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981. So, no Gandhi, no Allende, none of the killings carried out in the name of militant Islam. Even some of the assassinations within the author’s time frame are not considered – Olof Palme’s, for example, or the murders in Italy’s anni piombi in the 1970s and ‘80s. Newton’s central argument is that in the period covered assassination became less about political causes and

Monday

The Reverend Michael Coren

We must be honest about honour killings

White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston — a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal — because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

The novels of Jane Austen have much in common with traditional detective fiction. It is an affinity that P. D. James has herself explored, notably in her essay ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, which she included as an appendix to her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest. Both types of fiction operate within enclosed and carefully structured worlds; both depend for their plots on a threat to the established order; and both conclude with tidy resolutions that contain an implicit promise that a happy, orderly existence now lies ahead. Death Comes to Pemberley combines these two traditions in a whodunnit set mainly at Mr Darcy’s stately home in Derbyshire,

Saturday

Sam Leith

Theatre of the macabre

Sam Leith marvels at Victorian Britain’s appetite for crime, where a public hanging was considered a family day out and murder became a lurid industry in itself On my satellite TV box, murder is being committed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I could probably live out the rest of my life watching the three CSIs, Bones, Criminal Minds and Waking the Dead without ever once breaking for a cup of tea or having to set the video to record. Is this a new thing? Sky Plus may be, but the obsession with murder? Not a bit. It all kicked off with the Victorians, as Judith Flanders’s winningly