A Pin to See the Peepshow

There’s a literary True Crime wave cresting in 2022 and it is Meta: teeming with books of all types that dissect our long obsession with the genre. Centuries before Penny Dreadfuls were condemned for corrupting Victorian youth, Executioner’s Tales were providing grim titillation. In the modern era, True Crime began using the lenses of psychology and sociology to focus on the “why” of a crime. And by replacing moralizing with “science,” it became horribly easy to see oneself as the victim or—gulp—the accused. In this 1934 novel based on an infamous 1922 murder case, crack storytelling and rich historical detail reanimate accused murderer Julia Almond and the rigidly patriarchal middle-class milieu which incubated the deadly act. Her tale gains intensity as the scene shifts to the courts and those same prejudices pervert justice and compound the crime. Long out-of-print, this cult classic has just been reissued in the British Library Women Writers series and is recommended for those who can’t get enough period crime series from the BBC.