Showing results for "simon mattacks" in Historical

London, 1925. With their band the Dizzy Heights, jazz musicians Ivor ‘Skins’ Maloney and Bartholomew ‘Barty’ Dunn are used to improvising as they play the Charleston for flappers and toffs, but things are about to take a surprising turn.

As Germany goes to war, the Nazis tighten their terrifying grip. Paranoia in the capital is intensified by a rigidly enforced blackout that plunges the city into oppressive darkness every night, as the bleak winter sun sets. When a young woman is found brutally murdered, Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke is under immense pressure to solve the case, swiftly. Treated with suspicion by his superiors for his failure to join the Nazi Party, Schenke walks a perilous line—for disloyalty is a death sentence.

December 1940. New Year's Eve draws closer, but crowds will not be gathering on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral to celebrate. After a quiet Christmas, the area has suffered London's most devastating air raid since the start of the Blitz and waves of incendiary bombs have burnt the heart of British book publishing to the ground. Detective Inspector John Jago finds a desolate woman sitting among the ruins of her family business and must break the news – her husband's been found shot dead at their home in Soho.

September, 1940. The sun is shining, and in the midst of the good weather Londoners could be mistaken for forgetting their country was at war - until the familiar wail of the air-raid sirens heralds an enemy attack. The Blitz has started, and normal life has abruptly ended - but crime has not. That night a man's body is discovered in an unmarked van in the back streets of West Ham. When Detective Inspector John Jago is called to the scene, he recognises the victim: local justice of the peace Charles Villiers. The death looks suspicious, but then a German bomb obliterates all evidence.

December, 1940. Christmas is coming, but the season of goodwill is overshadowed by the death and destruction of the Blitz. In London's Covent Garden, where the glamour of theatreland rubs shoulders with the bustle of the capital's biggest fruit and vegetable market, the war has closed the theatres and ruined the market trade. When a daylight air raid hits the Prince Albert Theatre in Drury Lane, rescuers find a man dying in the wreckage. But it wasn't the bomb that's ending his life - he's been stabbed, and with his dying breath he whispers what sounds like a fragmented confession.

September 1940. As the Blitz takes its nightly toll on London and Hitler prepares his invasion fleet just across the Channel in occupied France, Britain is full of talk about enemy agents. Suspicion is at an all-time high, and no one is sure who can be trusted. In Canning Town, rescue workers are unsettled when they return to a damaged street and discover a body that shouldn’t be there. When closer examination of the corpse reveals death by strangling, Detective Inspector John Jago is called upon to investigate.

September 1940 is finally drawing to a close. With London having endured the Blitz for nearly a month, people are calling for vengeance: Britain should retaliate even harder with their own bombing campaign in enemy territory. But once again the night heralds more destruction. At Custom House, anxious residents dutifully head to the nearest public air-raid shelter as the warning siren wails. When dawn brings the all-clear people disperse, but one man remains - he's dead, stabbed through the heart.

A wicked Scottish winter has just begun when pioneering female physician Sophia Jex-Blake calls on Detective Inspector Ian Hamilton to investigate the suspicious death of one of her patients - a railroad lineman who she believes succumbed to the horrific effects of arsenic poisoning. The most provocative aspect of the case doesn’t escape Hamilton: the married victim’s numerous sexual transgressions. Now, for the first time since the unexplained fire that killed his parents, Hamilton enters the Royal Infirmary to gain the insights of brilliant medical student Arthur Conan Doyle.

October, 1940. Bombs are falling on Stratford when air-raid warden Sylvia Parks sees a house with a light shining like a beacon to the enemy aircraft overhead, violating the strict blackout regulations. With no answer at the door she manages to break in, only to discover the body of a young woman – and she's been strangled with a stocking. For Detective Inspector John Jago, the scene brings back memories of the gruesome Soho Strangler, who murdered four women in the mid-1930s but has never been caught. Is there a connection?

Armistice Day 1940. The Blitz Detective John Jago finds himself despatched to Pimlico to investigate a suspicious death. A young man, Terry Watson, has been found in an Anderson shelter, battered about the head, and with two white poppies in his pocket. As the investigation delves into Watson's background, Jago and his assistant DC Craddock find themselves knee-deep in Pimlico's shady underworld and connections with Oswald Mosley's BUF party. It will take all their skills to uncover the truth behind the pacifist's brutal death.

November 1940. Darkness descends, and another anxious night begins for those tasked with guarding the industrial heartland of London from enemy attack. As a policeman patrols the Royal Albert Dock, something catches his eye - a man is sprawled awkwardly across a nearby barge, a dagger lodged in his back. Detective Inspector John Jago of West Ham CID discovers the victim was a dock worker by day and a Home Guard volunteer by night - and there are things even his wife doesn't know about his past.

As dawn breaks on a chilly morning in November 1940, a car is found ablaze in an abandoned builder's yard a stone's throw from the Regent's Canal in Camden Town. In the burnt-out vehicle police find the charred remains of a body. The victim is Les Latham, a commercial traveller for the Barings confectionery company. He liked to be known as Lucky Les, but it seems his luck has finally run out. DI John Jago discovers among Latham's belongings a mysterious photograph and some suspicious-looking petrol ration books that set Jago off on a murky trail of deceit, corruption and murder.

When London’s finest jazz musicians, the Dizzy Heights, are booked to play the glitzy Midsummer Ball at a country house in Oxfordshire, they expect a weekend filled with flappers and toffs having a roaring good time. But the festivities at Bilverton House take a turn for the worse when the group are stranded by a summer storm. And when a member of the Bilverton family turns up dead in a locked room in an apparent suicide, Skins, Dunn and Ellie realize this is going to be a much tougher gig than they thought.

Spiritualism has captured the public’s imagination. Séances are all the rage, and Detective Ian Hamilton’s otherwise sensible aunt Lillian is not immune to their allure. But for Ian, indulging her superstitions has its limits. When members of Lillian’s circle of séance friends begin turning up dead, Ian doesn’t need a medium to tell him these aren’t freak accidents.

Sorceress, Princess of Colchis, Securer of the Golden Fleece. Medea - her very name is a byword for infamy. Legend has it that she murdered her own children for revenge. But love in Ancient Greece was often a dangerous game; and legends are not always what they seem. Medea, devoted wife of Jason, was also a loving mother, a loyal friend of Herakles and a brave adventurer with the Argonauts. A woman both betrayer and betrayed, the real story of Medea is strange, sensual and heroic.

An uneasy peace reigns in Wales. It's 1109 and the truce with England hangs by the thinnest of threads. While King Gruffydd ap Cynan's rule of law holds in the north, a spirit of rebellion is rising in the south, as tearaway princes and rebels grow to resent England's oppression of their homeland. And when Nesta, married off in a political move by England's King Henry, leaves the safety of her husband's castle to attend a celebration, the rebels seize their opportunity.

1957. A catastrophe occurs at the pharmaceutical lab in Coventry where 16-year-old Wilf is working for the summer. A catastrophe that needs to be covered up at all costs. 2017. Phiney is shocked by the death of her grandfather, Wilf, who has jumped from a railway bridge at a Coventry station. Journalist Mat Torrington is the only witness. Left in utter disbelief, with a swarm of unanswered questions, Phiney, Mat and Wilf's wife, Dora, begin their own enquiries into Wilf's death.