Remarkable Rogues: The Careers of Some Notable Criminals of Europe and America

Twenty lives lived outside the law, examined in vivid detail by a writer who understood that the line between villainy and fascination is thinner than society admits. Charles Kingston profiles criminals whose names once dominated newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic: confidence tricksters who bilked the wealthy, murderers whose trials were Spectacles, thieves who pulled off heists still discussed by criminologists a century later. What emerges is not mere catalog of depravity but a window into the Victorian and Edwardian underworlds where these figures moved with surprising audacity. Kingston writes with detachment yet permits himself occasional admiration for sheer audacity, reminding readers that the public's obsession with criminal celebrities is nothing new. These are not sanitized case files but character studies of men and women who chose danger over drudgery, and paid the price. For readers who crave history with teeth, who want their true crime to smell of old newspapers and gaslight, this collection delivers twenty stories of ambition gone magnificently wrong.