BLUE FIRE centers on the enigmatic figure of Constance Kent, a young British woman who in 1865 astonished the world by confessing to the brutal murder of her three year old half-brother five years before. “The Road Hill House Murder,” as it was called in the national press, was a notorious crime that had gone unsolved by the new special branch of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard. It dominated the news, where it was obsessively speculated upon, and became material for Charles Dickens’ last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and his friend Wilkie Collins’ masterpiece The Moonstone. By confessing to a clergyman who used her story to further his agenda of restoring the confessional, Kent set off an upheaval in the Anglican church and street riots. She came to trial and was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment. After twenty years in prison, constructing mosaics for church floors, she emigrated under a new name to Australia, where she became a nurse and social activist, and lived another sixty years, dying at the age of 100 in 1944.

The most extraordinary aspect of her story, however, is the near certainty that her confession was false. Her detailed narrative, which inspired the first examples in two literary genres, true crime and sensation fiction, does not tally with the facts established by forensic evidence. BLUE FIRE displays a selection of the hundreds of contemporary documents used by Wendy Walker in her book of the same name (forthcoming in 2009 from Proteotypes), as well as photographs from her research. They shed new light on this justly famous case.