Victorian murder
Sir: In David Hare's review of my book Vintage Victorian Murder (I May) he suggests by implication that I am callous about death. This is untrue. 11 am deeply con- cerned by the fact that so many victims of murder meet totally undeserved deaths in circumstances of horror and cruelty. I am not concerned to keep alive, at the public expense, deliberate, con- victed murderers because a long experience of murder in Britain and abroad has convinced me that the quicker these people are hanged the better.
It is surely cheapening the stan- dards of criticism to be expected of a 'resident playwright of the Royal Court Theatre' to describe these sincerely held views as 'nasty right- wing propaganda.'
Moreover my book is reviewed under the generic heading of 'Crime Fiction'. It is not fiction. The famous and typical Victorian cases presented are hard fact. I should like the SPECTATOR reader- ship to know this and to be given an opportunity of deciding whether the book is as anger-provoking as Mr Hare makes it out to be or as intriguing a picture of Victorian murder as several mature critics have acknowledged it to be.
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