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Showing posts from May, 2017

Carry him off in a patent coffin: body snatching in the eighteenth century

Occasionally Dan turned the pages of his newspaper. Someone was advertising a new design of coffin, secure enough to keep out body snatchers. Good luck with that, he thought. The Butcher’s Block : A Dan Foster Mystery I recently spent an afternoon in Frenchay, near Bristol, visiting the Frenchay Unitarian Chapel. The Chapel dates from the seventeenth century and has several interesting features. These include a door said to have been specially designed to allow women wearing crinolines under their skirts to enter the building, and a weathervane which is thought to commemorate the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1759.   Frenchay Unitarian Chapel I’d gone in search of something more prosaic: the Body Snatchers' Stone. In the forthcoming Dan Foster Mystery, The Butcher’s Block , Dan is drawn into the grisly world of body snatching, which quickly leads him into a much bigger and more dangerous criminal conspiracy. Body snatching was a common crime in the eig