Suffocating Suspense
Richard Davenport-Hines, 16 March 2000
Cult Criminals: The Newgate Novels 1830-47
by Juliet John.
Routledge, 2750 pp., £399, December 1998,0 415 14383 7 Show More
by Juliet John.
Routledge, 2750 pp., £399, December 1998,
“... Bulwer-Lytton himself had inaugurated the fashion for this brand of crime fiction with Paul Clifford (1830), and restrained the tendency to verbosity and false pathos that marks his other fiction. He believed, he wrote in an essay of 1838, that in the portraiture of evil and criminal characters lies the widest scope for an author profoundly versed in ... ”