The Fox and the Flies by Charles Van Onselen
At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial sex. Criminal syndicates from Buenos Aires to London and from Cape Town to New York were able to organise the seduction or rape of women in under-developed parts of Europe and their 'export' as prostitutes to meet an insatiable demand for sexual services. For three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph Silver - brothel-owner, pimp and trafficker in women on four continents - was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust and sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner, jewel-thief, rapist, safe-cracker and sodomist, Silver's notoriety was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. What those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves, however, was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates built on 'vice', only to have him outwit them as he moved in the dangerous space between police and prostitutes. A disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult misogynist driven by dark biblical and medieval obsessions, Silver's mental universe remained largely hidden from his family, other gangsters and police handlers. In this first reconstruction of the life of a dangerous psychopath, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world to identify the most infamous serial killer of all time - for Joseph Silver's darkest secret of all lay in London, in Whitechapel, in the autumn of 1888.
Charles van Onselen is an acclaimed biographer who has been honoured with visiting fellowships at Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. A graduate of Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and St. Antony's College, Oxford, his earlier works on the social history of southern Africa won him, amongst others, the American African Studies Association's Herskovits Prize, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies' Trevor Reese Memorial Prize and the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. He has published extensively in leading historical journals in America, England and France. A Fellow of the Royal Society (S.A.) he has recently been a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the recipient of an honorary doctorate in literature from Rhodes University. He is currently Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780224079297 |
| ISBN 10 | 0224079298 |
| Title | The Fox and the Flies |
| Author | Charles Van Onselen |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2007-04-05 |
| Number of pages | 672 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |