Murder by the Book

In May 1840, the aristocrat Lord William Russell was found in his London townhouse with his throat cut. Suspicion fell on his valet, François Courvoisier, but the evidence against him was thin — until investigators discovered what he had been reading: Jack Sheppard, William Harrison Ainsworth's wildly popular novel about a criminal who repeatedly escapes the gallows.

Claire Harman uses the case to trace the rise of the "Newgate novel," a genre of sensational true-crime-adjacent fiction that dominated bestseller lists in the years before the murder, and the alarm it caused among the era's literary establishment. Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, both early in their careers, took opposing sides in the ensuing debate over whether such books could incite real violence — Dickens defending the form, Thackeray condemning it — with Queen Victoria herself following the case closely.

Murder by the Book combines true crime, Victorian publishing history, and literary biography into an account of one of the first public panics over whether fiction can cause real-world harm.