THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT
James Gardner

The Balcombe Tunnel murder in Sussex was the most sensational news item back in 1881 surpassing in newspaper coverage even the assassinations of the Russian Tsar and the American President. It was only the second murder to have been committed on an English train. On a sunny Monday afternoon in June, a retired businessman was brutally attacked in a first class carriage on the London to Brighton train and thrown into the tunnel. Eventually, a young twenty-one year old author and journalist, Percy Lefroy Mapleton, was convicted and hanged at Lewes prison. In the last ten days of his life he wrote a fascinating 19,000 word autobiography. Only discovered by the author over a hundred years later, it throws new light on a man and a crime that both shocked and fascinated Victorian society.
Illustrated paperback.

Paperback 192 pages
Published by the author
ISBN
Price £9.50