Andy Secombe

One morning in May 1840, on a respectable Mayfair street, elderly Lord William Russell was discovered in bed with his throat cut. When his assassin claimed he had been inspired by a recent sensational novel, it sent shock waves through literary London, and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. The crime, the investigation, the city's fevered fixation and the Victorian age are all brilliantly scrutinized in this account of a surprisingly literary crime.