Goodman, Jonathan

Jonathan Walter Goodman was born on 17 January 1931 and raised in Wimbledon in southwest London. He was once called "the greatest living master of true-crime literature," but his interests went far beyond the murders he helped to make famous. He was a stage manager and producer in London's West End theater district before turning his talents to writing. He published almost 40 books in his lifetime - complete murder accounts, anthologies, the Celebrated Trials series, fiction, and poetry.

Detailed Biography of Jonathan Goodman

Jonathan Goodman, once called "the greatest living master of true-crime literature," was a man whose interests ranged far beyond the murders he helped to make famous. He believed that the study and literature of true crime is about much more than the simple rehashing of a misdeed - rather that a crime provides the opportunity to immerse oneself in a time and culture in a way "proper" history books do not.

Jonathan Walter Goodman was born on 17 January 1931 and raised in Wimbledon in southwest London. His mother died when he was in his early teens, and, unable to cope with the loss, his father sent him away to live with an aunt and uncle who ran a boarding house in Putney. After National Service in the Royal Air Force, he made his way to London's burgeoning theater scene in the early 50s working first as a stage manager and eventually as a producer in London's West End. He married Susan Wylie-Harris in 1959 after the two had met at an amateur dramatic production, and, although the marriage was quickly dissolved, the two remained close friends.

By the mid-1960s, having already cut his teeth on the crime novel Instead of Murder and as a television director for the popular ITV police drama No Hiding Place, Goodman was looking for a new challenge when a colleague from the Liverpool Playhouse suggested a walk to the nearby scene of one of the country's most notorious murder cases, 29 Wolverton Street. It was here in 1931 that William Herbert Wallace, a quite unassuming insurance salesman, had allegedly murdered his wife in one of the most bizarre who-done-its ever. Goodman was hooked. He read the entire transcript of the Wallace trial, tracked down lawyers, living witnesses and police officers, and even located the man he believed to be the real culprit. In 1969, Goodman burst on to the true crime scene with The Killing of Julia Wallace and it was immediately hailed as, "the clearest, most balanced, and most readable dissection of a murder case that I have yet had the pleasure of reading," by Michael Gilbert in The Sunday Telegraph. With his trademark style of exhaustive research and florid prose, Goodman published nearly 40 titles over the next 35 years solidifying his reputation as "the premier English investigator of crimes past."

In addition to his more comprehensive accounts of famous murders such as The Stabbing of George Harry Storrs and The Passing of Starr Faithfull, Goodman worked with several notable authors such as Albert Borowitz and Jacques Barzun to produce a series of themed anthologies of crime which include The Railway Murders, Murder in Low Places, The Christmas Murders, and Acts of Murder . He also edited the Celebrated Trials Series and never stopped writing fiction.

He was a member of the Medico-legal Society, The British Academy of Forensic Sciences, and the secretary of Our Society, a select group of 75 judges, lawyers, police officers and a few crime writers founded in 1903 who discussed brutal crimes over civilized dinners.

He died in 2008 just one week shy of his 77th birthday.

From the guide to the Jonathan Goodman papers, 1685-2008, 1965-1996, (Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives.)