Krim og spenning

From his offices at Basinghall Street in the City of London, Henry Slater presided over Britain's best-known private detective agency, king of all he surveyed. In the late Victorian era, and into the twentieth century, his name was synonymous with the Golden Age of private detection; he was a truly modern operator, utilising the press and technology, and creating innovative publicity campaigns to keep his agency in the public eye. One of the key skills of the private detective was the ability to make friends - to infiltrate the lives of individuals, and to get them to trust them with their secrets. Slater, however, would make one mistake: to befriend the wrong person and to entrust them with his secrets. When that friendship ended, competition in the private detective world would lead to a trial so infamous that Winston Churchill himself came to watch proceedings play out at the Old Bailey. The trial would destroy Henry Slater's career, and expose his real identity. This is the first in-depth study of private detective work in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain, looking at the 'Golden Age' of private detectives and the work they did. It provides a fascinating look at the type of person who became a private detective, the people who wanted to be their clients - and the crimes that could be committed along the way. This book sheds new light on this profession, building on the author's previous work on female private detectives in order to enable the reader to gain a better understanding of a job that people of all classes desired to do. But it is also about the career of one man. Sherlock Holmes may have been the most famous fictional private detective, but Henry Slater was, for twenty years, the real star of the private detective world.

London has a history that emerges from the mist of time some 1500 years ago and is one that evolves yet never ends. It has always been a breeding ground for crime as people from around the world are drawn by its numerous attractions and opportunities. Each generation has produced its own colourful cast of robbers, murderers and fraudsters. Much of the crime was prompted by poverty and foul living conditions, but the main driver has always been the desire or need for money by whatever means and the risks involved. Until the eighteenth century this often involved a trip to perform 'the Tyburn jig' in front of a baying crowd of thousands. For a time Londoners staggered around in a gin-induced haze. Mothers often abandoned or even sold their children, just for a chance to block out the horrors of a seething London. The lanes and alleys around Covent Garden were lined with prostitutes, many still children. Famous beauties were kept by aristocrats and royalty and referred to as courtesans, although in many cases the dividing line between them and their less fortunate sisters lining the streets was thin indeed. The ending of the Great War saw the appearance of drugs, although at this stage they were mainly confined to the rich and influential as London entered the 'jazz age'. The second world war and the Blitz was not all about the spirit and bravery of Londoners, as gangs plundered wrecked houses and even stole from corpses. After the war the likes of the violent Jack Spot and Billy Hill were superseded by the Kray twins and the sadistic Richardson brothers, as they fought for control of London's drinking clubs. A little light relief was offered throughout the years by a succession of sexual scandals. Those particularly welcome involved senior politicians. A heady brew indeed covering centuries of crimes and indiscretions brought together this very readable account by author and social historian Mike Hutton.

On 2 November 1952, two teenagers, Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig, tried to break into a warehouse in Croydon, Surrey. The police were called and in the minutes that followed, Craig wounded one policeman and shot another dead. At 16, Craig was too young to hang, but Bentley, at 19, was not. Even though he had not fired a shot or carried a gun and was under arrest at the time PC Sidney Miles died, Bentley was deemed to be guilty of murder. The law - of joint felonious enterprise - was unjust and Bentley had an IQ of 66 (the national average is 100). Even so, he was hanged at Wandsworth in February 1953. Nearly forty years later, PC Claude Pain, who was there at the time of the shooting, told a different story. He was on the warehouse rooftop and saw the whole thing. What really hanged Bentley were the words he allegedly used, 'Let him have it, Chris'. And Pain did not hear those words. M.J. Trow's Let Him Have It, Chris, published in 1990, was based on Pain's new evidence. Eight years later, the conviction against Bentley was overturned - not as a result of police corruption, but because of the appallingly partial performance of the trial judge, Lord Goddard. At the time, access to any material relating to the case was denied and only now, with the Freedom of Information Act, can Pain's testimony be refuted. He was not on the roof. His original deposition is still in The National Archive. This book aims to put the record straight. There was indeed a dreadful miscarriage of justice in 1952 - one of many before and since - and, in a way, Claude Pain was part of it.

Prepare for an exhilarating journey in 'Play with Me' by B.J. Edwin. This gripping tale will keep you hooked with its thrilling suspense and unexpected twists. Join our courageous protagonist as they navigate a treacherous game where nothing is as it seems. With vivid storytelling and heart-pounding action, Edwin delivers a captivating read that will leave you on the edge of your seat until the very end. Get ready to dive into a world of mystery and danger that will leave you breathless!

A global thriller, told through flashbacks, revealing how success is nurtured by ambition and greed, and built on a platform of lies, deceit and privilege. Reveals the psychology of the protagonist's actions as he alternates between defiance and angst, hope and fear.

Inspired by a true story, acclaimed author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour Ashley Winstead descends into the underworld of true-crime amateur sleuths in a chilling first-person account of one woman's role in the investigation of the gruesome slaying of three small-town university students.

An empowering story of a woman who loses everything but gradually finds love, friendship and meaning out of the ashes of her former privileged life.

My search for the origins of the whale culture has now taken me from the first findings on the East coast of Greenland across the Arctic Ocean and down the Bering Sea to the Aleutian Islands. Here I have found evidence that they originated in the Pacific, which brings us to Japan and the Yonaguni monument. Here it becomes evident that the Whale culture originated from hunter-gatherers, on the Eurasian Mammoth step, who have begun to hunt seals and whales in the Sea of Japan and have then crossed over to Japan from where their culture has adapted to the rich hunting waters of the Pacific during the ice age. The abundance of hunting game has led them to be very successful in the Pacific and to have the resources to develop their unique culture, where they lived on and hunted from the ice cover on the Ocean. On the journey from Japan across the Pacific we find evidence on Hawaii that causes us to take a detour to Kiritimati.There we find evidence that very specific ocean currents during the ice age created a continent of ice in the pacific during the ice age with very rich waters both to the north and south of this ice continent on which the whale culture established a civilization that must have been the real lost continent of Mu. From this continent the whale culture of Mu could cover the entire pacific in their airships based on whale skin and bone. In our continued search we come to Tahiti and New Caledonia to find the source of the specific conditions in the ocean currents that led to the formation of the ice continent of Mu and how these conditions started to collapse and led to the decline of the Whale culture in the Pacific. We thus end up following the whale culture to New Zealand, where it tries to adapt to the missing sea ice and follows the ice south towards the Antarctic before disappearing.