Thursday, February 12, 2015

Amy Helen Bell's "Murder Capital," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Murder Capital: Suspicious Deaths in London, England, 1933-53 by Amy Helen Bell.

The entry begins:
Murder Capital doesn’t have one main historical actor. It’s a study of how the investigation of murders and other suspicious deaths in London changed during the Second World War and its aftermath, and how the social upheavals and physical changes in the city affected who was committing deadly violence and why. One of the main themes that came out of this research was the use of crime scene photography by the Metropolitan Police and public prosecutors as a tool to document crimes and to give judges and juries a visual context for the cases being considered. In the film version of the book, I’d make the main character a young police photographer, just starting out in 1934, taking pictures of a murdered bookie in a Kensington workhouse. The film would trace his fictional career along with the actual history of the cases which were photographed , ending with the unsolved case of a schoolgirl stabbed on a street corner in Brixton in 1953. I’d have him played by Martin...[read on]
Visit Amy Helen Bell's website.

My Book, The Movie: Murder Capital.

--Marshal Zeringue