51. Murder by the Book - Live from the Hay Festival

Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley - the stories of women who kill - is back for a brand new series.

This first episode is recorded in front of a live audience at the Hay Festival in 2025, with special guest Sarah Waters (bestselling author of Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith) and in-house historian Professor Rosalind Crone. The team discovers which of our infamous lady killers inspired great writers to immortalise them in print.

They explore the lives of women like Edith Thompson, accused of killing her husband, although she never laid a finger on him. Edith captured Sarah Waters' imagination while researching her romantic thriller The Paying Guests, which is set - just like Edith’s story - in socially turbulent 1920s suburbia.

Then there’s Maria Manning, who was reincarnated as an ‘imperfectly tamed’ French maid Hortense by Charles Dickens in his proto-detective story, Bleak House.

And Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman on the run, who inspired Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Beloved.

With the usual mix of curiosity, insight and hilarity, Lucy and the team ask what makes these particular women so compelling. Can historical fiction actually communicate more than factual history? What makes for a good baddie?

Featuring live readings from actor Clare Corbett and pre-recorded reconstructions, Lady Killers: Murder by the Book brings a contemporary feminist perspective to crime as it happened and as it’s reimagined on the page.

Recorded live at the Hay Festival 2025.

Producer: Sarah Goodman Assistant Producers: Riham Moussa, Mikaela Carmichael Readers: Clare Corbett and Moya Angela Sound Design: Chris Maclean Executive Producer: Kirsty Hunter

A StoryHunter production for BBC Radio 4.