Edinburgh is a city rightly famed world-wide. It is perhaps the only large British city which can be described as beautiful. It always seems to have been at the centre of major events, many of them turbulent. The innumerable murky legends of murder, misdemeanour and mayhem have perhaps taken root because of the topography and architecture of the Old Town with its maze of ill-lit and menacing wynds, closes and courts. Leading off the High Street and the Cowgate there are still places redolent of the atmosphere of past Edinburgh. In this simple introduction to the dark side of Edinburgh’s history, the authors have brough together some well-known and other more obscure tales of dark deeds. They can reveal that it did not all take place in the Old Town.