London's Underworld: Three Centuries of Vice and Crime

By Fergus Linnane

Book Overview

London is a city that thrives on crime and the myths of crime, as its violent history and the colourful portrayal of criminals in fiction, from Defoe to Dickens, attest. London's Underworld examines the murky underside of the capital, surveying three centuries of vice and crime and a variety of perilous underworlds. Fergus Linnane's writing is full of vivid detail as he describes the city's underworld characters, such as the loathed, murderous, eighteenth-century bounty hunter Jonathan Wild, the Italian Sabini gang which dominated London in the early twentieth century, and the more recent Billy Hill, Jack Spot, Frankie Fraser, Kray twins and Adams family. London's Underworld takes us on the nightmarish last journeys of condemned criminals to the gallows at Tyburn. We enter death-trap eighteenth century prisons, one of which the novelist Henry Fielding described as a 'prototype of hell'. We walk the crowded streets of Victorian London with its swarms of prostitutes and follow the ingenious villains who carried out the first great train robbery in 1854. We see the rise and fall of the interwar racecourse gangs and the bloody battle for control of the West End. This fascinating book, containing 25 images, illustrates how crime in the capital has evolved from the extreme violence of the early eighteenth century to the vastly more complex and lucrative, but no less brutal, gangland of today. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1861057423
• ISBN13: 9781861057426
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Robson Books
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.2" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Fabulous and accurate.

Like all Linnane's work, this book is a hoot. It's also well researched and thorough. For a historian or researcher, it is invaluable.