Classic Crimes

<p><strong>Dorothy Sayers</strong> called William Roughead ''the best showman who ever stood before the door of the chamber of horrors,'' and his true crime stories, written for the most part in the early part of the last century, are indeed among the glories of the genre. Displaying a meticulous command of evidence and unerring dramatic flair, Roughead employs a brilliantly restrained, cooly ironic style to bring to life some of the most notorious crimes and extraordinary trials of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Scotland. And wonderfully engrossing as they are, these accounts of premeditated mayhem and miscarried justice also cast an exact and powerful light on the evil that human beings, and human institutions, find it both pleasant contemplate, and all too easy to do.</p>