Dick Turpin

Dick Turpin was an eighteenth-century English criminal whose career included deer poaching, burglary, robbery and horse theft before later legend transformed him into a romantic highwayman. He was associated with the Essex Gang during the early 1730s and subsequently took part in robberies around London and the surrounding counties.

After moving north under the alias John Palmer, Turpin was arrested in Yorkshire and identified when a former schoolmaster recognised his handwriting. He was convicted of horse theft and hanged at York in 1739; the famous stories of heroic rides and gallant highway robbery developed largely in nineteenth-century popular literature.

Richard Foreman’s Turpin’s Assassin sends Dick Turpin to London with stolen goods and turns his dealings with the fence Joseph Colman into a hunt for a killer whose scheme may make Turpin the expendable victim. Turpin’s Prize shifts him from highway robbery to the attempted theft of the Rock of Light, where rivals and seduction make the supposedly simple prize increasingly dangerous. In Turpin’s Rival, he pursues the outlaw James Skinner for the murder of Tobias Vardy and is forced into another bargain with Colman. Foreman’s anthology Never Surrender uses Turpin in a reversal where the famous highwayman becomes the intended victim of a robbery, while The Die Is Cast gives him a story about confronting a false associate amid the volume’s wider collection of historical adventurers.