Welcome to the official website of Joan Lock

Her crime fiction includes short stories and eight novels, one modern and seven Victorian, featuring the charismatic Detective Inspector Ernest Best.

Dead Image

Dead Image, Hale, 2000
The first Best mystery

Paperback edition 2012
Large Print, Ulverscroft, 2001
Audio Book, Soundings, 2001

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Published by the Mystery Press (Fiction Imprint of the History Press) March 2012

The explosion was heard twenty miles away. It killed canal boatmen and wrecked the exotic Pompeian villa of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the fashionable St John's Wood artist. But what caused the 1874 Regent's Park Explosion? Fenian bombs? Sabotage by rival railways or other firms? Or was it something personal?

And whose was the other body found in the canal? An artist's model? The missing King's Cross barmaid? Or another victim of the so-called Thames murderer?

As he struggles to find the answers, Scotland Yard's Sergeant Ernest Best straddles the conflicting worlds of art, wealth and privilege and that of the poverty-stricken canal boatmen in an intriguing mystery that will change his life forever.

'Joan Lock's Dead Image finds new material among the teeming Holmesian possibilities of late-Victorian London ...moves easily between rough-and-ready canal folk and the fashionable London artistic community....a solidly researched crime novel.'
The Times

'Dead Accurate'
Waterways World

'. . . a novel I recommend without reservation.'
Sherlock Holmes Magazine

Scotland Yard's First Cases

Robert Hale: 30 November 2011

When Scotland Yard's first detective branch was set up in 1842 crime was very different from today. The favoured murder weapon was the cut-throat razor; carrying a pocket watch was dangerous; the most significant clue at a murder scene might be the whereabouts of a candle or a hat; large households (family, servants and lodgers) complicated many a case and servants sometimes murdered their masters.

Detectives had few aids and suffered many disadvantages. The bloody handprints found at two early murder scenes were of no help, there being no way of telling whether blood (or hair) was human or animal. Fingerprinting was fifty years away, DNA profiling another hundred and photography was too new to help with identification.

In spite of these handicaps and severe press criticism, the detectives achieved some significant successes. Charles Dickens said that Scotland Yard detectives gave the impression of leading lives of strong mental excitement. Readers of this book will understand why...’