There has always been fascination with crime, deviance and punishment; from the days of the highwayman to the Luddites and in the foul deeds of Peter Sutcliffe. Add to that, the continuing allure of the unsolved case, which has long provided material for true crime and fiction writers. In Stephen Wade’s casebook, Murder in Mind he looks at his favourite investigations in his home county of Yorkshire, rich with villainous acts, painstaking investigations and outright injustices. Read about Leeds’ most notorious female killer Louie Calvert and why he believes her conviction and hanging could have been a travesty; famous hangmen, Chartist rebels, and the many cases open to fresh investigation such as those of Bill o’ Jacks, Mr Blum and Emily Pye. Murder in Mind brings together Stephen’s journeys into the criminal underworld, including his work as a writer in prisons and his research in the murder archives as he attempts to uncover and understand why such heinous acts are committed. The basis for this book was created in the “Yorkshire Ripper’ years, when the impact of that series of murders sparked the crime writer in him and his tutor, Stanley Ellis, worked on the notoriously misleading "Ripper Tapes.‘
Since then Stephen has written over 70 non-fiction titles - many of them on the history of crime and the law - but this is something different, a mixture of memoir, reflection and the realisation that murder often happens down the street.