Victorian Police

This is the unique and personal story written by the great grandson of a former Victorian beat ‘Bobby’ who progressed through the ranks to eventually become the very first Royal Detective. James Wood, a former ‘sharp shooter’ in Queen Victoria’s mighty Army of the Empire, joined Manchester City Police force to become the youngest ever Superintendent in their history - and was also a highly acclaimed ‘thief taker,’ something of a bounty-hunter. For many years around the turn of the century, he helped protect a number of prominent VIP’s and several visiting members of the ...

Before Jack the Ripper terrorised London, Police Inspector Samuel Ravenscroft patrolled the streets of Whitechapel. Clever and hard-working, Ravenscroft nonetheless has the worst record in the force. He lets a murderer escape during a chase and is banished to the spa town of Malvern for a water treatment to cure his asthma. Ravenscroft accepts a dinner invitation from a new acquaintance, Jabez Pitzer. Before dinner, the maid finds Pitzer slumped over his desk - dead. Ravenscroft immediately recognises the signs - Pitzer has been poisoned.

Kate Ardleigh is everything the Victorian English gentlewoman is not - outspoken, free-thinking, American...and a writer of the frowned upon penny dreadfuls. Soon after her arrival in Essex, England, a body is unearthed in a nearby archeological dig - and Kate has the chance to not only research her latest story but to begin her first case with amateur detective Sir Charles Sheridan.

This audiobook presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity that ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice.

With her headful of wild curls and wilder ideas and an unabashed love of experiments and explosives, society has labeled Lady Imogen Loveless peculiar…and doesn’t know she’s one of the Hell’s Belles—a group of vigilantes operating outside the notice of most of London.

The brutal murder of septuagenarian John Templeman shocks the little cottage community of Pocock's Fields. Rumours of illicit affairs, army desertion and violent confrontations spread as the community waits to see who will be sent to trial. An extraordinary power struggle develops between the Coroner, leading the Inquest, and the Police Magistrate, leading the Inquiry. As the case reaches a crisis point, just how far will the authorities be willing to go to bring the perpetrator to justice?

Hours later, the man’s cold body lies in the city mortuary, alongside the woman he couldn’t save. And his sister, unconventional nurse Gemma Tate, tracks down troubled police inspector Sebastian Bell to unravel the truth. Sebastian has enough pressure to solve the murder of an aristocratic heiress without Gemma meddling in his case. But the cryptic sentences she brings him from her brother’s notebook could be a crucial lead. If only they knew what “milky way” meant.

Secrets of the Royal Detective: Self Education for the Police 1899: This amazing document was located in my great grandfather's personal effects about 90 years after his death. He was a former Royal Detective or protection officer - and a detective superintendent with Manchester Police - during the harsh Victorian & Edwardian development of policing in Manchester until 1914. This is a unique guideline for all policing during this period and contains a rare glimpse into what was expected of the policeman of that era. It is in effect a 'Bobbys' Bible' and the contents were expected to be ...

Edinburgh, 1869: Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is adjusting to her new life in Victorian Scotland. Her employers know she’s not housemaid Catriona Mitchell—even though Mallory is in Catriona’s body—and Mallory is now officially an undertaker’s assistant. Dr. Duncan Gray moonlights as a medical examiner, and their latest case hits close to home. Men are dropping dead from a powerful poison, and all signs point to the grieving widows… the latest of which is Gray’s oldest sister. Poison is said to be a woman’s weapon, though Mallory has to wonder if it’s as simple as that.

BRITISH LEGAL HISTORY - The Fielding Brothers & Bow Street Runners - the early days and beginnings of policing in England with the infamous Fielding Brothers, the early Bow Street Runners, Robert Peel, Jerome Caminada, and other brutal crime fighters, covering highway robberies, gruesome murders, street crime and a host of dangerous attacks on society. A fascinating slice of legal history and nostalgia, featuring Victorian & Edwardian Manchester crime.

1882 - When her stepmother is murdered, Lady Felicity Armstrong learns that her yearly income will barely cover the cost of food, but she has a secret. While the manor house called Rosendale is being inventoried to cover her stepmother’s debts, Felicity discovers something in her birth mother’s dressing table that gives her hope of a brighter future. She also has a plan, which she hopes will bear fruit, and deliver her from a life of poverty. Two years later, she is struggling to survive. Her young maid, Millie, a plucky urchin whose devotion to her lady is irrefutable, has taught ...

London, 1893: High up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O'Donnell's Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow but burning with questions: Why does the seamstress choose to jump out of that window? Why is there a cryptic message sewn into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances?

London, 1882. Alec Lonsdale, a young reporter on the Pall Mall Gazette, is working on a story about a fatal house fire. But the postmortem on the victim produces shocking results: Patrick Donovan's death was no accident. But why would someone murder a humble shop assistant and steal part of his brain? When a second body is discovered, its throat cut, and then a third, Lonsdale and his spirited female colleague, Hulda Friederichs, begin to uncover evidence of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest echelons of Victorian society.

Thomas Pitt, mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion, where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow. Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful, notorious Egyptian woman Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion. Pitt’s orders are to protect—at all costs—the good name of the third person in the garden: senior cabinet minister Saville Ryerson. The distinguished public servant, whispered to be Ayesha’s lover, insists that she is as innocent as Pitt himself.

On December 10, 1880, Coroner Sévère makes a gruesome discovery: nine newborns, buried in flowerpots, and hidden in plain sight in Whitechapel. A mortician receives the bodies and vanishes. Clues for the two seemingly unconnected cases are scarce. When police and coroner learn that the missing mortician might have spent his last moments at the bosom of the infamous prostitute Miss Mary, a series of events is nudged into motion. Lies are unearthed, rumours spread. Yet, the killer remains a faceless phantom. His secret seems buried forever. Until the night Sévère requests Miss Mary’s ...

London, 1851. With the opening of the Great Exhibition at hand, interest in mounting in the engineering triumphs of the railways, but not everyone feels like celebrating. In an audacious attack, the London to Birmingham mail train is robbed and derailed, causing many casualties. Planned with military precision, this crime proves a challenge to Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck who fights to untangle a web of murder, blackmail and destruction.

A fascinating insight into the life of some famous Manchester Victorians (or Mancunians) - as they were called. They include Arthur Balfour the former Prime Minister, Alfred Harmsworth - later to be known as Lord Northcliffe of newspaper fame, Ned Hulton, Jerome Caminada, and details about the popular Belle Vue Pyrodramas and their re-enactment of some of the great South African battles of Queen Victoria's Army of the Empire. They were sometimes known as 'Fire in the Park' and included parts played by real Zulu's such as Kumalo.

London, June 1860: When an assassination attempt is made on Queen Victoria, and a petty thief is gruesomely murdered moments later - and only a block away - Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field quickly surmises that these crimes are connected to an even more sinister plot. Was Victoria really the assassin's target? Are those closest to the Crown hiding something? Soon, Field's investigation exposes a shocking conspiracy in which the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species sets off a string of murders, arson, kidnapping, and the pursuit of a diabolical madman.

It is the summer of 1871 when Scotland Yard's Inspector Ben Ross pays a visit to Jacob Jacobus, the old rogue of Limehouse: infamous antiquarian, friend to villains, and informer to the police. Ben hopes to glean information about any burglaries that might take place now that the wealthiest echelons of society are back in London for the season.

Rayner the middle years is the sequel to ‘Rayner the early years’ a fictional biography of arguably the most popular Scotland Yard detective being the principle subject in the Victorian Detective’s Casebook series by the same author. In the second part of the story, Richard Rayner has left Oxford and joined the Metropolitan Police only to find his ambition to be a detective is not as easy as he had once thought. A number of incidents tend to obstruct his career path, including working for a Sergeant who has an unusual way of disciplining his men, and having to face false accusations ...