After the Glorious Revolution, a not so glorious age of lawlessness befell England. Crime ran rampant, and highwaymen, thieves, and prostitutes ruled the land. Execution by hanging often punished the smallest infractions, and rip-roaring stories of fearless criminals proliferated, giving birth to a new medium: the newspaper. In 1724, housebreaker Jack Sheppard—a “pocket Hercules,” his small frame packed with muscle—finally met the hangman. Street singers sang ballads about the Cockney burglar because no prison could hold him. Each more astonishing than the last, his final jailbreak took him through six successive locked rooms, after which he shimmied down two blankets from the prison roof to the street below. Just before Sheppard swung, he gave an account of his life to a writer in the crowd. Daniel Defoe stood in the shadow of the day’s literati—Swift, Pope, Gay—and had done hard time himself for sedition and bankruptcy. He saw how prison corrupted the poor. They came out thieves, but he came out a journalist. Six months later, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders covered another death at the hanging tree. Jonathan Wild looked every bit the brute—body covered in scars from dagger, sword, and gun, bald head patched with silver plates from a fractured skull—and he had all but invented the double-cross. He cultivated young thieves, profited from their work, then turned them in for his reward—and their execution. But one man refused to play his game. Sheppard didn’t take orders from this self-proclaimed “thief-taker general,” nor would he hawk his loot through Wild’s fences. The two-faced bounty hunter took it personally and helped bring the young burglar’s life to an end. But when Wild’s charade came to light, he quickly became the most despised man in the land. When he was hanged for his own crimes, the mob wasn’t rooting for Wild as it had for Sheppard. Instead, they hurled stones, rotten food, and even dead animals at him. Defoe once again got the scoop, and tabloid journalism as we know it had begun.

June 1815. When Henry Morton is called to the scene at Portman House in Claridge Square, the Bow Street constable finds a man dead in a hackney coach--ostensibly of asphyxiation. He was Halbert Glendinning, a gentleman of unsullied character. Then why was he seen frequenting one of London’s most notorious dens of iniquity? And why has the driver of the coach vanished into the night? While Sir Nathaniel Conant, the chief magistrate at Number 4 Bow Street, accepts the official verdict of accidental death, Morton is certain that Glendinning was a victim of foul play. With the help of actress Arabella Malibrant, one of London’s most celebrated beauties, he embarks on his own discreet inquiry. And as the upper circles of London society close ranks against him, Morton races to unmask a killer whose motives are as complex and unfathomable as the passions that rule the human heart.

The mesmerizing story of two notorious criminals in 18th-century London--Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard--"The Thieves' Opera" is an eminently readable work of popular history that blends meticulous scholarship with the best of the storyteller's art. Engravings.

In the cellar there was no sound at all except her own breathing and the soft rustle of her skirts. After her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she noticed a niche in the wall a yard from where she stood. She saw something there about the size of her fist. Agnes quietly picked it up. It was wrapped in a cloth and surprisingly heavy. . . a pistol, the hilt filthy with mud and dirt. Suddenly she heard the chinking sound of glasses nearby. There was no mistaking the voices now. Before she had time to call out, another door creaked open and the pair emerged from the darkness. Agnes Meadowes is cook to the Blanchards of Foster Lane, the renowned London silversmiths. Preparing jugged hare, oyster loaves, almond soup, and other delicacies for the family has given her a dependable life for herself and her son. But when the Blanchards' most prestigious commission, a giant silver wine cooler, is stolen and a young apprentice murdered, Theodore Blanchard calls on Agnes to investigate below stairs. Soon she is inside the sordid underworld of London crime, where learning the truth comes at a high price.

The historical literature of political deviance is sparse. This unusual work, chronicling the history of Jonathan Wild, represents an effort to come to terms with one of the more amazing characters of English social history. Wild was both part of the policy system in eighteenth-century England, and also one of the most adroit criminals of the age. In the 1720s, London suffered the worst crime waves in its history. Civic corruption took place on a staggering scale. The government's answer was to pay a bounty for the capture of robbers, thus creating a class of professional informers. Wild was applauded as the most efficient thief hunter and gang breaker in British society; but his own posse of thief catchers was basically a front behind which he was able to control the underground world, through a complex system of blackmail, perjury, and terror which the book details. All who opposed him were betrayed to the law, and in the struggle for power Wild sacrificed several hundred of his own people to the hangman. No one since his time, with the exception of Lavrenti Beria of the late Stalin era GPU so nearly succeeded in bringing the underworld under the control of one system of power. At one level, this is a biography of the world's first supercriminal. At another, it is a sociology of criminal behavior and its political consequences. Howson sheds fresh light, not only on a figure who has become famous in literature, but more important, on the entire structure of gang life. The book is written "as a "terrifying and fascinating study of a historical epoch; it also offers a completely fresh picture of the birth of modern organized-crime families as part of modern organized political systems.

Boston, 1767: Revolution is brewing and intrigue swirls around firebrands. But for a thieftaker who makes his living by conjuring spells that help him solve crimes, politics is for others until he is asked to recover a necklace worn by the murdered daughter of a prominent family.

Darren Rapier's Epic big cast play, exploring monetarism and corruption, as well as the idolisation of criminals. Set in the 18th Century.