About Paul Thomas Murphy

Paul Thomas Murphy has had a lifelong obsession with the Victorians, and, after years of study of Victorian literature and Victorian history—at McGill University, the University of Colorado, Oxford University—came to the conclusion that the best way to bring their teeming, colorful, complex world to a wider audience was by focusing on some of the more striking cultural collisions of the age: collisions of class, of gender, of ideology, of the law and the courtroom. From this conclusion came Shooting Victoria, one of the New York Times’s 100 best books of 2012: the accounts of the seven haunted boys and men who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria—and the story of the Queen herself, who not only for 42 years weathered their attacks, but prospered because of them. And then came Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane, a finalist for the Edgar award for Best Fact Crime, the story of the young maid-of-all-work brutally murdered in Greenwich in 1871, and of the public outcry and the tangled legal machinations that followed: a crime that remained unsolved—until now. And now comes Falling Rocket, the story of the greatest high-culture battle of the Victorian era, with James Whistler, America’s greatest artist, suing John Ruskin, England’s foremost critic, for a bad review—and setting off a battle between the two that would last a lifetime. Murphy and his wife—coincidentally named Victoria—live high in the Rocky Mountains, where he usually can be found in his study, gazing at the Continental divide while musing upon more ways to tell the never-ending story of the Victorians, one battle at a time.