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The Seaside Murders: Thirteen Classic True Crime Stories
Book by unknown
- GenresTrue Crime
Paperback
First published March 16, 1989
17 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Goodman
67 books6 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Jonathan Goodman was one of Britain's leading historian of crime. The American critic and historian Jacques Barzun described him as "the greatest living master of the true-crime literature", and Julian Symons, another big name in true-crime, thought of him as "the premier investigator of crime past".
His career as a full-time writer began in the 1970s when he edited the Celebrated Trials series which itself was a successor to Notable British Trials. Then in the 1980s, he worked on numerous anthologies, such as The Railway Murders (1984) and The Seaside Murders (1985), often persuading his many friends to provide a chapter and then writing a short introduction. He also continued to research old murder cases, writing books on the Newcastle upon Tyne murder of Evelyn Foster, the New York locked-room mystery of card-playing womaniser Joseph Elwell and, in 1990, The Passing of Starr Faithfull, the daughter of a Manhattan society couple whose body was washed up on Long Beach, New York, in 1931, for which he received the Crime Writers' Association's gold dagger for non-fiction.
He is most well known for uncovering a solution to Britain's most baffling real-life whodunnit, the murder of Julia Wallace in Liverpool in 1931; he not only exonerated the dead woman's husband but identified and traced the man he believed to be the real murderer. This was documented in The Killing of Julia Wallace (1969).
Jonathan Goodman was one of Britain's leading historian of crime. The American critic and historian Jacques Barzun described him as "the greatest living master of the true-crime literature", and Julian Symons, another big name in true-crime, thought of him as "the premier investigator of crime past".
His career as a full-time writer began in the 1970s when he edited the Celebrated Trials series which itself was a successor to Notable British Trials. Then in the 1980s, he worked on numerous anthologies, such as The Railway Murders (1984) and The Seaside Murders (1985), often persuading his many friends to provide a chapter and then writing a short introduction. He also continued to research old murder cases, writing books on the Newcastle upon Tyne murder of Evelyn Foster, the New York locked-room mystery of card-playing womaniser Joseph Elwell and, in 1990, The Passing of Starr Faithfull, the daughter of a Manhattan society couple whose body was washed up on Long Beach, New York, in 1931, for which he received the Crime Writers' Association's gold dagger for non-fiction.
He is most well known for uncovering a solution to Britain's most baffling real-life whodunnit, the murder of Julia Wallace in Liverpool in 1931; he not only exonerated the dead woman's husband but identified and traced the man he believed to be the real murderer. This was documented in The Killing of Julia Wallace (1969).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 17, 2018
My takeaway from this is that I'm very glad I'm single or I'd be likely to end up murdered. The wives in this book did not fare well at all. And men all seem to be greedy, cheating murderers. Despite the subject matter, the writing on a lot of these was pretty dry. One was so boring and repetitive I gave up about halfway through and skimmed it. The last story was pretty much the exact plot of a Jack Ketchum book I read a while back. Ketchum's had a lot more violent, disgusting detail than this one did.
February 16, 2019
From Kirkus Review: "A spotty gathering of murder-case reports--some recent, some from bygone volumes." That pretty much nails it; this book contains a handful of good chapters (the Ogden Nash contribution, for example) surrounded by mediocrities.
March 20, 2022
Another fab collection of true crime tales by Jonathan Goodman.Admittedly I had heard of the majority of them before that still doesn't detract from the fascination of reading them again....any fan of true crimes will find this collection most enjoyable.
September 22, 2024
Pretty slow and boring, I DNFed around the second to last story.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews