My Favourite Non Fiction Reads of 2021

For the second year running I also read a number of great non-fiction books that I really enjoyed. Once again they are in alphabetical order. These were -

Shadow Voices: 300 Years of Irish Genre Fiction: A History in Stories by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton) The story of genre fiction - horror, romantic fiction, science fiction, crime writing, and more - is also the story of Irish fiction. Irish writers have given the world Lemuel Gulliver, Dracula, and the world of Narnia. They have produced pioneering tales of detection, terrifying ghost stories and ground-breaking women's popular fiction. Now, for the first time, John Connolly's one volume presents the history of Irish genre writing and uses it to explore how we think about fiction itself. Deeply researched, and passionately argued, Shadow Voices takes the lives of more than sixty writers - by turns tragic, amusing, and adventurous, but always extraordinary - and sets them alongside the stories they have written, to create a new way of looking at genre and literature, both Irish and beyond. Here are vampires and monsters, murderers and cannibals. Here are female criminal masterminds and dogged detectives, star-crossed lovers and vengeful spouses. Here are the Shadow Voices. 

We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City by Justin Fenton (Faber & Faber) Baltimore, 2015. Riots were erupting across the city as citizens demanded justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old black man who died in police custody. At the same time, drug and violent crime were once again surging. For years, Sgt Wayne Jenkins and his team of plain-clothed officers - the Gun Trace Task Force - were the city's lauded and decorated heroes. But all the while they had been skimming from the drug busts they made, pocketing thousands in cash found in private homes and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent. Because who would believe the dealers, the smugglers or people who had simply been going about their daily business over the word of the city's elite task force? Now, in light of their spectacular trial of late 2018, and in a work of astounding reportage and painstaking self-discovery, Justin Fenton has pieced together a shocking story of systemic corruption.

My Life as a Villainess: Essays by Laura Lippman (Faber & Faber) - I knew something new about venality - my own. I realized I had become the bad guy in someone else's story. And I deserved it. Laura Lippman's first job in journalism was a rookie reporter in Waco, Texas. Two decades later she left her first husband, quit the newspaper business, and became a full time novelist. I had been creating villains on the page for about seven years when I finally became one. Her fiction has always centered on complicated women, paying unique attention to the intricacies of their flaws, their vulnerability, and their empowerment. Now, finally, Lippman has turned her gimlet eye on a new subject: herself. My daughter was ten days old the first time I was asked if I were her grandmother. In this, her first collection of essays, Lippman gives us a brilliant, candid portrait of an unapologetically flawed life. Childhood, friendships, influences, becoming a mother in later life - Lippman's inspiring life stories are at once specific and universal. 

The Reacher Guy by Heather Martin (Little Brown) The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. Through parallels drawn between Child and his literary creation, it tells the story of how a boy from Birmingham with a ferocious appetite for reading grew up to become a high-flying TV executive, before coming full circle and establishing himself as the strongest brand in publishing. Heather Martin explores Child's lifelong fascination with America, and shows how the Reacher novels fed and fuelled this obsession, shedding light on the opaque process of publishing a novel along the way. Drawing on her conversations and correspondence with Child over a number of years, as well as interviews with his friends, teachers and colleagues, she forensically pieces together his life, traversing back through the generations to Northern Ireland and County Durham, and following the trajectory of his extraordinary career via New York and Hollywood until the climactic moment when, in 2020, having written a continuous series of twenty-four books, he finally breaks free of his fictional creation.

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan (Harper Collins) is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder.The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction. There's Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crew mates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws. Join lawyer and writer Kate Morgan on a dark and macabre journey as she explores the strange stories and mysterious cases that have contributed to UK murder law. The big corporate killers; the vengeful spouses; the sloppy doctors; the abused partners; the shoddy employers; each story a crime and each crime a precedent that has contributed to the law's dark, murky and, at times, shocking standing.

Based on A True Story by Kate Morgan

The words ‘based on true events’ always adds an extra frisson to dramas or films, especially those that involve that most notorious of crimes – murder.   While researching my book ‘Murder: The Biography’, I came across this collision of fact and fiction time and time again.  The recurring influence of these stories in dramas, books and films shows that our collective fascination with murder and murderers continued unabated.  It predates our contemporary obsession with true crime documentaries by several centuries.  In the Middle Ages, strolling minstrels composed and sang ‘moritats’ (‘murder ballads’) about infamous crimes.  These warbled morality tales were the earliest true crime documentaries, turning tales of murder into a macabre oral history, with a heavy dash of folklore to boot.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, the tradition of the murder ballad had evolved into depictions of grisly cases on the stage.  The 1817 murder of Mary Ashford in the countryside around Birmingham was a prime example.  Mary’s body was dredged from a pond early one spring morning; her assumed assailant Abraham Thornton was acquitted of her murder at trial and the case has never been officially solved.  Her death was the subject of inspired several stage plays, all of which leaned  heavily towards melodrama.  I didn’t have room to include the infamous Red Barn murder in the book, but in a similar vein, this 1827 shooting of Maria Marten in Suffolk inspired a cottage industry of novellas, plays and songs.  Like the Ashford case, the brutal killing of a young woman in a rural setting caught the public imagination and plenty of dramatic licence was used to fill in the gaps and translate the story to the stage.

Towards the end of the century, the burgeoning tabloid newspaper industry spotted the draw of crime stories and a new national obsession was born.  The Illustrated Police News was the go-to publication for true crime fans and I came across its lurid stories while researching cases from that era.  It’s coverage of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888 made it famous and the News’ depictions of Jack the Ripper’s victims are instantly recognisable even today.  The paper’s bloodthirsty coverage of the trial of Frederick Baker for the murder of eight year old Fanny Adams was a useful source on the case and a revealing insight into contemporary attitudes to murder and its depiction in the press.  In another mingling of fact and fiction, historian Peter Ackroyd quoted apocryphal coverage from the Illustrated Police News in his novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, to add period atmosphere to his story of a string of brutal murders in East London, inspired by the Ripper. 

In the twentieth century, our tastes for true crime became a little more nuanced and some controversial cases would cast long shadows, both in society and in pop culture as well.  The book looks in some detail at the 1950s murder convictions of Ruth Ellis, Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans; and there was no shortage of material, both factual and dramatic, to plough through on each of these cases.  All three were executed for murder with heavy question marks looming over their convictions.  Evans was wrongly scapegoated for murders at Rillington Place in London, which were actually the work of serial killer John Christie; Bentley was put to death for the murder of a policeman despite the fact that he had not fired the fatal shot; and Ellis hanged for the shooting of her abusive boyfriend outside a Hampstead pub.  The cases were all the subject of films – 10 Rillington Place, Let Him Have It and Dance with a Stranger respectively, each of which is a minor gem of British filmmaking.  The contentious executions at the heart of each case meant that hangman Albert Pierrepoint made a cameo appearance in all three of the stories, and I read plenty about the amiable executioner, who ran a pub when he wasn’t presiding over executions.  He finally got his own biopic in 2005, when he was played by Timothy Spall in the film Pierrepoint. 

With her platinum blonde hair and a Smith & Wesson clutched in her manicured hand, Ellis herself could have sprung from the pages of a noir fiction novel.  Indeed, her case caught the attention of American novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of private eye Philip Marlowe, who was in London at the time of her trial.  He was sufficiently moved by the death sentence to write to the London Evening Standard to protest at the savagery of the English courts in hanging a woman. 

With a topic as big as murder, it’s impossible to fit in every case I came across, even some of the really juicy ones.  With regret, I had to bypass the cautionary tale of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, the lovers who were both executed for murder in 1923, after Bywaters had fatally stabbed Thompson’s husband.  I’d already decided to use the sad story of Derek Bentley to cover the tricky issue of joint enterprise posed by the case.  But the glamorous Thompson and her lodger turned lover Bywaters have inspired a wealth of crime fiction – Agatha Christie alluded to the case in a couple of books and Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel The Documents in the Case draws heavily on the murder.  More recently, the influence of the story can be seen in Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests.

My book is very much rooted in the factual, exploring the history of the law of homicide and the real-life cases that have shaped it down the centuries.  But I found that these fictionalised accounts can tell their own stories about infamous murders and more widely, about our obsession with crime in all its forms.  After all, the scariest stories are always the ones that are true. 

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan (Harper Collins) Out Now

Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder.  The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction.  There's Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws.

 

Kate Morgan in Conversation

 

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan (Mudlark

Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder. The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction. There's Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws. 

Join lawyer and writer Kate Morgan on a dark and macabre journey as she explores the strange stories and mysterious cases that have contributed to UK murder law. The big corporate killers; the vengeful spouses; the sloppy doctors; the abused partners; the shoddy employers; each story a crime and each crime a precedent that has contributed to the law's dark, murky and, at times, shocking standing.

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