Word: roughead
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...gallows. Editor de la Torre's scholarship is graced with gusto that sometimes falls into archness, but her selections are almost all first-rate. Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift are among the old pamphleteers and balladeers represented; later hands include George Borrow and the Edinburgh lawyer, William Roughead, whom many connoisseurs consider the dean of crime writers. Neither police nor detectives in the modern sense existed in the 18th Century. Parish constables were amateurs serving a term, and parish watchmen were aged criers, of small use in chasing or collaring villains. Novelist Henry Fielding, while a magistrate, founded London...
...MURDER-William Rough-ead-Sheridan House ($2.75). Excellently written studies of eight famous 17th-and 18th-Century murders, including Pennsylvania's notorious Châpman murder (with arsenic: 1831) and the sensational French killing of the Duchess of Praslin by her husband (sharp and blunt instruments: 1847). Author Roughead's calm, intelligent, slightly old-worldly accounts (Twelve Scots Trials, Enjoyment of Murder) have made him, in Dorothy Sayer's words, "the best showman that ever stood before the door of a chamber of horrors...