How Nigel de Grey and the Rev. William Montgomery read a German telegram in a London basement two days before Arthur Zimmermann meant anyone to.

On the night of 1 January 1886 a Pimlico schoolmaster lay dead beside a bottle of chloroform, a sponge and a cloth. A new entry in the Rogues’ House.

Jack Sheppard, the boy who broke out of Newgate four times, and the penny serial that made him London's favourite criminal.

Two centuries the Rossignols' number-code kept a king's secret; when the spell broke, it pointed at a man who died without his name.

How two Deptford shopkeepers were murdered for a tin cash box, and the fingerprint that hanged the Stratton brothers at the Old Bailey in 1905.

A cat's-meat seller kept a shop on Hanbury Street, a few yards from where the Ripper's second victim fell.

Dogs' dung was called 'pure'. Mayhew measures the men and women who gathered it and the Bermondsey tanneries that paid them.

A penny serial about the ragged street-boy gangs of the capital, in 103 weekly parts, later banned for indecency.

In a hedgerow by an Essex lane, a wrapped parcel held a mystery that London traced vainly for forty years.

In 1804 a Hammersmith excise officer killed a bricklayer he mistook for the village ghost; the law never forgot it.

Catherine Hayes, the last woman burned at Tyburn for petty treason, and the head in the Thames that found her out.

A Polybius square keyed on a single word; the figures hide a sentence.

A boy, a torch of pitched tow, and the dark streets he sold for a farthing.

A severed torso found in the foundations of the new police headquarters became one of the greatest puzzles of the age.

An 1839 Edinburgh penny serial sold the Mediterranean's most dreaded name: a ship that burned her own epithet across her stern.

A Bermondsey poltergeist of 1857, and the thirteen-year-old who owned it.

Gaslight true-crime: Frederick Baker's four-word diary on a hot Saturday in Alton, 1867.

In the summer of 1835 the best newspaper in New York told its readers that Sir John Herschel had found life on the Moon. It was all a lie, and everyone who wanted to believe believed it.

In the summer of 1835 The Sun told New York that Sir John Herschel had found life on the Moon. It was all a lie, and everyone who wanted to believe believed it.

A sixteenth-century way of hiding a message in plain sight. Tonight's Midnight Dispatch: the Cardano grille and a masked-letter puzzle.

Jack Black, rat-catcher to the Queen; the night-side trade of London. Fresh dispatch.

The Rogues' House: a body hidden in a laundry drain for five years, and a confession that closed the Road Hill House case.

The Grand Staircase at Carlton House, Charles Wild, 1819 (public domain)

A Parisian clerk turned the body into a filing system, and for twenty years the criminal could not hide from his own dimensions.

How a widow’s cottage in Stockwell was haunted for one Twelfth Night, and the servant who did the haunting.

Kate Webster killed a widow at Richmond, boiled the body, and spent two weeks wearing her clothes. A Midnight Dispatch.

A smuggled cask, a cryptanalyst, and the code that undid a queen. A Midnight Dispatch on substitution ciphers and the Babington Plot, 1586.

A Victorian night-side trade: the boys and women of the low-water mark. From The Midnight Dispatch.

A penny-dreadful dispatch on G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844-45).

The Theatre Royal has kept a resident who never bought a ticket — a man in a grey cloak who walks the Upper Circle and melts into the wall.

The highwayman died at York in 1739. The 190-mile gallop to York was invented a century later by a novelist who needed a hero and a horse.

The Bermondsey Horror: the Mannings and the murder of Patrick O'Connor, 1849. Old Bailey ref t18491029-1890.

The Vigenere square, the cipher they called indecipherable, with the parlor puzzle in the same table keyed BAKER.

A Pacific Mail liner, a fog-bound rock a mile from home, and a hundred and twenty-eight souls lost in ten minutes off the Golden Gate, 1901.

London's body-snatchers dug the dead from the churchyard to sell to the surgeons; the Anatomy Act of 1832 closed the trade.