The Life and Trial of Major Armstrong
Robin Odell
(Criminology) (True Crime)
Exhumation of A Murder
The Life and Trial of Major Armstrong
Robin Odell
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 186992892x New ISBN 9 781869 928926
£15.00/US$22.00
Subjects: Criminology / True Crime
Click HERE for UK edition
Click HERE for USA&AUS edition
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”The case of Major Armstrong, the celebrated Hay Poisoner, the only solicitor ever to hang, is one of those classic, old-fashioned English murders which hail from the heyday of court-room drama when, with the hangman lurking in the pine-and-panel wings and the black cap an object of horrifyingly alarming currency rather than mere symbolism, the loser in ‘the black dock’s dreadful pen’ lost all. It comes straight out of the pages of George Orwell’s essayed nostalgia for the era of the Great British Murder, when, after a Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire, you put your feet up on the sofa and, with a good strong cup of mahogany-brown tea, read all about the latest ‘good’ murder in the News of the World. And the Armstrong case was unquestionably one of the best; right up there in the grand tradition of Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, and George Joseph Smith.”
– Richard Whittington-Egan
”Now the case itself, as has been said to you, is a remarkable one, a deeply interesting one and I doubt whether any of us engaged here today have in recollection so remarkable a case in its incidents.”
– Mr Justice Darling, Herefordshire Winter Assizes, Thursday, 13th April 1922
”On the rim of the twentieth century loom the Titans – Seddon, Armstrong, Crippen, G.J. Smith and Landru, and then, in the era of booze and bullets, art descends literally to hack-work.”
– Dorothy Dunbar, Blood in the Parlour
Praise for EXHUMATION OF A MURDER
”This is, indisputably, a comprehensive study; embracing every aspect, exploring every angle; chronicling events and interpreting participants from remote and obscure beginnings to violent or peaceful ends. I advise anyone who has long subsisted on intriguing scraps and morsels about Armstrong to have this book ready to hand when leisure offers time for a satisfying repast…it is unique, and will inevitably become the last word on Armstrong and the case which bears his name.”
– Edgar Lustgarten
EXHUMATION OF A MURDER is the fruit of painstaking research over many years by J.H.H.Gaute, a well-known authority on the literature of crime and a former editor on the genre for a major publisher, and the late Dr Hubert Trumper who lived at Cusop, near Hay-On-Wye, the village where Armstrong lived and carried out his crime. This book contains a wealth of documents and photographs.
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SPECIAL EVENT
Featuring ROBIN ODELL in HAY-ON-WYE, at Murder & Mayhem Bookshop, Lion Street.
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