Stephen Bates

A gripping account of the murders committed by Dr William Palmer, the 'Prince of Poisoners', and his dramatic trial in 1855. In 1856, a baying crowd of over 30,000 people gathered outside Stafford prison to watch the execution of a village doctor from Staffordshire. One of the last people to be publicly hanged, 'the greatest villain who ever stood trial at the Old Bailey,' as Charles Dickens described him, Dr William Palmer was convicted in 1855 of murdering his best friend, but was suspected of poisoning more than a dozen other people, including his wife, children, brother and mother-in-law - cashing in on their life insurance to fund his crippling gambling habit. Highlighting Palmer's particularly gruesome penchant for strychnine, his trial made news across Europe; he was a new kind of murderer - respectable, middle class, personable, and consequently more terrifying - and he became Britain's most infamous figure until the emergence of Jack the Ripper. The first widely available account of one of the most notorious, yet lesser-known, mass-murderers in British history, The Poisoner takes a fresh look at Palmer's life and disputed crimes, ultimately asking 'just how evil was this man?' With previously undiscovered letters from Palmer and new forensic examination of his victims, Stephen Bates presents not only an astonishing and controversial revision of Palmer's entire story, but takes us into the very psyche of a killer.

Paying for a peerage - an illegal practice - feels like a very modern form of corruption, one that both the Labour and Conservative parties have been happy to indulge in at times during the early twenty-first century. Except, of course, it was happening almost a century ago.Meet Maundy Gregory, actor, journalist, publishing proprietor, conman, embezzler, MI5 spy - and the man you went to see if you had the money to pay for a peerage in the post-First World War years.Cutting a dash across high society of the 1920s - he was in attendance at the wedding of the future George VI - the immaculately oiled and overdressed Gregory would happily pockets thousands for playing Mr Fixit for wannabe knights and lords, and swell the coffers of Lloyd George''s Liberal Party to millions of pounds.Business was brisk, and business was brazen. Visitors to his lavish office on Parliament Street, with a direct line to ''Number 10'', would be wined and dined and, after paying up, leave satisfied that they would be next on the list for a knighthood or barony. Nothing could be guaranteed, of course, and it was a strictly no refunds business. But Gregory was also suspected of being something else, to add to his impressive list of accomplishments: a murderer. As the political winds changed, the debts mounted up and the walls closed in around him, he somehow managed to inherit his mistress''s not inconsiderable savings when she scribbled a new will on the back of a menu and was suddenly taken ill ... In The Man Who Sold Honours, Stephen Bates lifts the lid on the truth about this long-forgotten character who remains the only person ever to be successfully prosecuted under the sale of honours act of 1925. A powerful preview of the scandals to come in Britain in recent years, this is the story of the original honours tout - a riches-to-rags tale of greed, corruption and murder in the interwar years.