Joan Lock

Violence in the news makes us all more security conscious, but criminal activity is nothing new. The threat may seem greater, but being alert and prepared remains the best defense. Burglars tend to go for easy targets. You can make your property, if not impregnable, at least very hard to get into. Dangerous new threats, such as home invasion and carjacking, call for new rules for the whole family. Confidence tricks have always come in an amazing variety...

The explosion was heard twenty miles away. It killed boatmen and wrecked the exotic villa of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the fashionable St John's Wood artist. But what caused the 1874 Regents Park explosion? Fenian bombs? Sabotage by rival railways or other firms? Or was it something personal? And whose was the other body found in the canal? An artist's model? The missing King's Cross barmaid? Or another victim of the so-called Thames murderer? As he struggles...

When Scotland Yard's first detective branch was set up in 1842, crime was very different from today. The favoured murder weapon was the cut-throat razor; carrying a pocket watch was dangerous; the most significant clue at a murder scene could be the whereabouts of a candlestick or a hat; large households (family, servants and lodgers) complicated many a case and servants sometimes murdered their masters. Detectives had few aids and suffered many disadvantages....

In 1878 the Criminal Investigation Department replaced Scotland Yard's corrupt and discredited Detective Branch. In this classic story of the early days of detection, Joan Lock tells the fascinating story of the creation of the CID, the scandal which preceded it, and the successes and failures of the new organisation, including early cases such as the four murders by Ernest Southey, the ferocious outbreak of dockland killings in 1869 and the more...