Caroline Crampton

He cites nine cases from this time span that have stood the test of time, some of which have been the subject of their own She Done It episodes, so great was their influence on Golden Age detective fiction.

Orwell's Chamber of Horrors is inhabited by William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner, Jack the Ripper, Neil Cream, Florence Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Frederick Seddon, George Joseph Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer, the so-called Hay Poisoner, Herbert Armstrong, and the tragic duo of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson.

For the ninth case, Orwell didn't name his protagonist, as the 1919 trial had ended in an acquittal, and putting such a person in this lineup of criminals would have almost certainly meant a libel action.

Historians now believe this to have been the murder of Mabel Greenwood by arsenic poisoning, for which her husband Harold, a solicitor, stood trial and was acquitted.

These are the most memorable cases from a period of English history that was marked by its rapid social and economic change, as well as a surge in the popularity of crime narratives, both real and fictional.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a book that has a fair claim to be the first true detective novel, was published in 1868 but set in 1850 at the beginning of Orwell's period.

In the decades that followed, newspapers and pamphlets vied with novels to claim the attention of a reading public hungry for salacious, sordid, satisfying stories of terrible crimes.

With the exception of Jack the Ripper, and he is always the exception, all the murders that Orwell selected from this period committed their crimes in private settings.

Poisoners, especially domestic poisoners, dominate his list.

And yet, at the same time, this was a period in which murder had never been so public.

One could not just attend a trial or an execution, but also keep up with every twist and turn of allegation and investigation.

Although Orwell himself never published any crime fiction, he did spend a fair amount of his time thinking about the questions that its popularity raised –

His interest began early.

Among the juvenilia that survives from his school days is a detective story titled The Vernon Murder, which is almost certainly the product of a joke with his school contemporary Cyril Connolly.

Vernon was Connolly's middle name, and the story contains a character called Cyril too.

An avid reader from his early years, as might be expected given that he was a teenager in the 1910s, Orwell's favourite fictional detectives

are those who slightly predate the post-war golden age of detective fiction.

G.K.

Chesterton's Father Brown, Ernest Brammer's Max Carrados, R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, and of course, Sherlock Holmes.

When Orwell died in 1950, one of the 523 books that were listed as being in his personal library was a very well-thumbed 1925 edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes.