"The Art of the English Murder" was written as a companion to the television presentation of the same name by Lucy Worsley. I don't know if the show ran in the United States. In any case, I have not seen it. I was drawn to the book because I have enjoyed Lucy Worsley's book "If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home". Ms. Worsley is a historian and Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces in Britain.
I was intrigued by the complete title, but I think I expected a different kind of book. It covers a period from the early 19th century to the end of World War II, which seemed a bit of an odd place to end, because of P.D. James, Elizabeth George, and other contemporary writers. But Ms. Worsley was content to end it with the Golden Age of Mysteries defined by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
Much of the book, especially the first two-thirds, is really about true crimes of the period which caught the public fancy, It was a time when literacy was rising among the lower classes in Britain and the lurid details of murders became popular reading. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins make appearances in this section. It really isn't until the chapter about Sherlock Holmes that books that might be more familiar to modern readers come under the microscope.
Ms. Worsley makes some interesting connections between crimes and literature, and she explores some of the psychological reasons that this type of reading has become so popular. But in the long run, this book falls between the two topics. It does not give enough detail to be a real psychological study of English murder and she does not cover enough literature to be satisfactory. Her short chapters on Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Alfred Hitchcock give a hint of what might have been. Alas, a deeper analysis would have much improved my impressions of the book.