Masters of crime: fiction's finest villains and their real-life inspirations

This fascinating volume reveals the real men - and women - behind some of the most infamous London villains ever to appear in fiction.

Fagin, Professor Moriarty, Moll Cutpurse and the notorious 'cracksman' A.J.

Raffles were all rooted in the lives and deaths of a litany of real-life criminals, agitators and activists.

With a special emphasis on the city that spawned them, this book brings together their stories for the first time, and shows how they were woven into fiction by some of Britain's greatest writers, including Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.