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Great Unsolved Crimes
 
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Great Unsolved Crimes (Paperback)

by Rodney Castleden (Author)
2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £6.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Futura Publications (26 Jul 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0708807879
  • ISBN-13: 978-0708807873
  • Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 11.2 x 4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 71,560 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Product Description
Murders go unsolved, villains slip through the police nets and as time goes by it becomes more and more unlikely that these crimes will ever be solved. The list grows bigger as yet another unsolved homicide file is put on the shelf. GREAT UNSOLVED CRIMES tells the stories of those cases that the police have worked so hard to solve and yet have not come up with enough evidence to close them. For example, the mysterious death of Thelma Todd, the popular actress of the late 1920s and early 30s, who was found dead in her parked car; Lizzie Borden, the American woman who was accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892; or Jack the Ripper who has been tied to the deaths of at least five prostitutes, but who was never caught...

About the Author
Commended for his meticulous research and fluency of expression, Rodney Castleden's work has been published for 30 years. A teacher of history, he lives and works in Brighton.

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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars The Author Solves The Crimes That 1000 Years Of Police Couldn't, 10 Dec 2007
By T. Owen (Leicester, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Weighing in at 575 pages, this isn't a book that you'll be finishing in anything approaching a hurry. Fortunately for me, it's spread into 39 chapters, so it's very possible to read for a short while, then put the book down for a period of time, without risk of losing where you are, like you would in another book.

Now, the author of this work is a crime-solving genius, and all police authorities would be wise to offer him whatever it costs to get him under their employment.

This is evident from the opening chapter, in which he's able to give clear indications of who killed King William Rufus a millennium ago. Despite the title of the book and the fact that people that were there at the time were unable to make the links themselves, he's able to set out how somebody who was never under suspicion at the time was able to pull it off.

Repeat this for all of the 39 murders covered in the book.

That, for me, is the problem with this work. Yes, he is able to give you the background for each story, which is what I wanted, but I dislike how he seems to make it into a script that the reader is supposed to follow to reach conclusions that were never realised in reality.

I find it hard to swallow that so many cases in history went unsolved when I, if this were fictionalised, would be able to determine who the culprits are just from the way that the story is written. And this guy wasn't there over the last thousand years, remember.

And there's not only that. There's the tenuous links he creates. For example, Lizzie Borden, of the nursery rhyme fame: "Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one."

Now, even people of the day knew that she had done it, although she was acquitted. Nonetheless, the author spoils things in the final paragraph:

"Those who think she could not have done it should remember what she did do to Abby's cat. A woman who is capable of beheading a cat is certainly capable of killing her father."

What tosh. It's not true in any realm of reality that the willingness to kill an animal, even if it's a seemingly pointless or cruel act, means that the person is automatically capable of patricide. We've all pulled wings off flies. Some of us will have used traps or poison to catch vermin.

Anyway, this kind of delivery tarnishes the book. I enjoyed some of the historical coverage, although wasn't impressed by the way he added details he gave in order to make it clear who the real culprit was, and idiocy where "willingness to harm an animal = undoubted willingness to murder one's father" really damages it.
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