Their Good Names Twelve Cases Of Libel And Slander With Some Introductory Reflections On The Law

Their Good Names: Twelve Cases of Libel and Slander with Some Introductory Reflections on the Law

Prince of Tricksters

Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making. The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics. Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.

The Persistent Prison?

The Prison system is widely believed to be an immutable element of contemporary society. Many criminologists and sociologists of deviance believe that decarceration movements have failed to yield progressive reform, and that feasible alternatives to the prison system do not exist. Maeve McMahon challenges these views. Reconstructing the emergence of critical perspectives on decarceration, she examines analytical and empirical problems in the research. She also points out how indicators of community programs and other penalties serving as alternatives to prison have typically been overshadowed through critical focus on their effects in 'widening the net' of control. McMahon presents a detailed analysis of decreasing imprisonment, and of the part played by alternatives in this, during the postwar period in Ontario. Drawing from extensive documentary research, and from interviews with former correctional officials, she charts the changing climates of opinions, and socio-economic factors, which facilitated decarceration. By situating her analysis in the context of theoretical and political arguments about the possibility of decarceration, McMahon provides in her work a stimulus to the development of progressive penal politics not just in Canada, but in all western countries.