The Mile End Murder.

"The case Conan Doyle could not solve.." so proclaims the blurb on the cover of this book by Sinclair Mc Kay which details the possible wrongful conviction of a death sentence imposed upon the accused murderer of a wicked old land lady in 1860. Conan Doyle's opinions on the case given special consideration due off course to his creation of Sherlock Holmes(Should that be "invention" of Sherlock Holmes?) more than thirty years later. Otherwise his connection to this story is slight at best. He did write about it, speculated on the very likely wrongful conviction, but it was not as though he started a campaign for a post execution exoneration. The blurb served its purpose though in that it caught my attention from a shelf of books displayed face out during one of my book hunts( should that be book Haunts?) off course I think that was because my brain translated it as "The case Sherlock Holmes could not solve.."
             In 1860 a widow land lady and land owner , Mary Emsley, was slain by a blow to the head, which caved her skull in, such was the ferocity. The details of the murder and the events which followed seemed to capture the collective imaginings of a gripped national capital as as al of London speculated the identity of the killer. Mary Emsley as a rent collector was not well liked, her ruthless streak manifest as she would not hesitate to throw a family into the street if they fell behind in a weeks rent. To many she got no more than her well deserved kharmic comeuppance for her continued heartlessness regarding her tenants.Thus, there were any number of suspects, but the one eventually convicted and punished for the crime was one who went out of their way to put themselves in the frame, while trying to do the very same to some one else. An action which put him firmly at the eye of the storm, or rather the target for a series of circumstantial evidence which collectively slipped a noose about his neck.
             Sinclair Mc kay details the events with a forensic eye to detail, chronicling not only the events of the case but recording the harsh grind of daily life in Victoria's London of the early Eighteen hundreds. He builds a picture about the life and times of a group of disparate folk, drawn together by a web of misfortune, frustrated ambition and hard times. It is a very compelling glimpse into an era of tough men and women, the times that shaped them, and the rough justice that honed them. Sinclair Mc Kay goes beyond recorded events and takes us down a path not taken, forwarding a possible and sadly highly plausible solution to this crime once thought solved.
              Yet it is a sobering thought that almost as soon as a a man was dispatched from this world in payment for a crime he may not have committed, whole new unexplored areas of suspicion were considered.