Book Report: Unsolved Murders & Mysteries edited by John Canning (1990)

This is another British collection of mysteries and true crime pieces. I’ve read this sort of thing before, but I’m too lazy to look in my archives to prove it to you. They’re exceptional idea books for coming up with essays for history magazines, and I have three items on my whiteboard from it.

Published in 1990, it contains a couple of things I remember from my youth: The dingo baby and KAL 007. I asked my wife about them, and she didn’t remember these news items from when we were 10. But I did. Strange, that.

The book includes the normal Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Rudolph Hess, and the Lindbergh kidnapping, but some other lesser-known stories, including the disappearance of an Australian Prime Minister who might have been a Chinese agent, the explosion of a British ship in Bombay during World War II, and whatnot.

The stories seem pretty straightforward, but the story about Korean Airlines Flight 007, shot down by the Russians, gives 100% credibility to the Russian account, and the book is pretty harsh on the American warmongers when the Maine blows up in Havana. Still, not too bad, just enough to arouse my skepticism.

But this kind of book is a starting point for research, not the definitive account.

Books mentioned in this review:

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