Price: £14.99 available now from Five Leaves Bookshop
Charlie Peace – His Amazing Life and Astounding Legend charts the evolution of a Victorian master burglar and murderer from truth to myth. The book begins with the way his crimes were reported in The Illustrated Police News before examining the growth of the legend in Penny Dreadfuls and ballads, before this criminal was uniquely transformed into a folk hero in popular theatre, waxwork shows, early cinema, music hall song and even comics.
The book will appeal to anyone interested in True Crime, 19th century literature, theatre and film history and popular culture. It contains kaleidoscopic extracts from rare and neglected sources and is heavily illustrated throughout.
is a Nottingham-born playwright and scriptwriter. He is best known for his television docudrama scripts, including Shipman, Why Lockerbie and Shoot to Kill, and for writing the feature film Fellow Traveller (1989), which won best screenplay in the British Film Awards. In recent years, he has become known for stage plays (including a play about Charlie Peace in 2013) and his radio dramas for the BBC
Five Leaves is a small publisher based in Nottingham, publishing 15 or so books a year. Our roots are radical and literary. These days our main areas of interest are fiction and poetry, social history, Jewish secular culture, with side orders of Romani, young adult, Catalan and crime fiction titles. You can find our latest and forthcoming books below, backlist section by section, and order books through a secure site run by Inpress. Our books are also available from bookshops and internet sites including The Book Depository and Amazon. If in London, you will find most of our books in stock at Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, five minutes from Kings Cross