The Varied and strongly contrasting murder cases related in this volume have been chosen by a personal yardstick the author describes in his preface. It is one that in the past, we are assured, has proved very exciting.
Side by side are dramas set in different countries at various periods of the present century. The irony of an alibi that helped to convict a man is matched by that of a jury whose verdict released a killer who couldn't stop bragging about how he cheated the law. While a mass murderer had his many-times-forfeited life saved by a legal technicality, a woman who kept a secret lover in hiding for years only to to have him destroy her husband saw the law cheated on a still more unusual technicality.
Viewed in any reasonable perspective such crimes seem incredible, and possibly by the sanity demanded of most novels they are, for the dead man who deliberately commits murder is surely as unique as the hypnotist who couldn't withstand his own compulsion. Both are here, like the bride who wedded murder and the father who ran from it only to catch up with it.
All the cases are intensely human in their several ways and collectively present a kaleidoscope of violence that is as colourful as it is chilling.
Side by side are dramas set in different countries at various periods of the present century. The irony of an alibi that helped to convict a man is matched by that of a jury whose verdict released a killer who couldn't stop bragging about how he cheated the law. While a mass murderer had his many-times-forfeited life saved by a legal technicality, a woman who kept a secret lover in hiding for years only to to have him destroy her husband saw the law cheated on a still more unusual technicality.
Viewed in any reasonable perspective such crimes seem incredible, and possibly by the sanity demanded of most novels they are, for the dead man who deliberately commits murder is surely as unique as the hypnotist who couldn't withstand his own compulsion. Both are here, like the bride who wedded murder and the father who ran from it only to catch up with it.
All the cases are intensely human in their several ways and collectively present a kaleidoscope of violence that is as colourful as it is chilling.
Used availability for Leonard Gribble's Murder Stranger Than Fiction