Studying crime, and the responses to it, has become one of the most productive methods of exploring the social and cultural history of modern Britain. Either through deep readings of particularly rich criminal cases or trials (for example, in the work of Judith Walkowitz, John Carter Wood, Lucy Bland, Matt Houlbrook, and Angus McClaren) or by examining specific types of criminal activity over time (Ginger Frost, Shani D'Cruze, Martin Wiener), historians have demonstrated how transgression can illuminate, among other things, the dynamics of state power, the construction of social identities, and the articulation of private anxieties and fantasies.

In Night Raiders, Eloise Moss pursues the second of these approaches in rewarding fashion by analyzing burglary in metropolitan London from 1860 to 1968. Burglary was defined in law during these years as breaking into a residential property in the night hours, and was distinguished from daytime “house-breaking” or theft more broadly. It therefore generated a specific set of connotations: an illicit intrusion into the privacy of the family home when people were most likely to be at home, and, if sleeping, at their most vulnerable. Moss investigates how this crime was addressed, imagined, and mitigated by the state, media, and the market, and outlines, with considerable shrewdness, what this reveals about some of the deeper forces shaping the evolution of urban life in London.

The book proceeds in three sections, and although these are not marked as such explicitly in the text, the organizing logic is clear. The first three chapters focus on burglars, notably the rise in the late nineteenth century of the professional burglar and how this shaped the understanding and portrayal of the crime more broadly in the period up to 1939. The story begins with the career, death, and extraordinary afterlife of Charles Peace, a prolific burglar from Sheffield who operated in London's Blackheath district and whose apprehension and execution for murder became the stuff of legend in the expanding newspaper and periodical press. Peace's real-life exploits are nicely juxtaposed with the fictional narratives of Ernest William Hornung's Arthur J. Raffles, a “gentleman thief” who was the protagonist of numerous short stories, films, and theater productions in the four decades after his first appearance in 1898. Peace and Raffles established the image of the burglar as an expression of a particularly masculine daring and expertise—and which made it so difficult for contemporaries to take seriously the female burglar, as chapter 3 outlines. Moss is a sensitive analyst of gender and is particularly strong on the erotics of burglary, which emerge in the repeated motifs of dashing and athletic men breaking into female boudoirs under the cover of darkness. Burglary undoubtedly generated considerable fear and distress among victims and potential victims, but it also intrigued and tantalized—it could be, Moss writes, a “pleasurable, entertaining category of crime,” and fed film and fiction across the period (209).

The middle section, on burglaries, outlines how the threat of the nocturnal break-in altered the material culture of the (middle-class) home. Door and window locks were the first line of protection, but the expanding market offered new products to meet the fears of apprehensive householders, from burglary insurance to elaborately decorated safes and increasingly sophisticated burglar alarms. But did these investments provide the security they advertised? Insurers did not always pay out, and by producing so many false alarms, security devices could cause more problems than they solved. There is a fascinating section on the introduction of the “999” emergency number in the late-1930s, but in a society where telephones remained scarce, this provided greatest reassurance to the wealthy. Moss is attentive to the “hierarchies of state protection” (208) against a crime that, despite the Raffles mythology, was far more likely to be carried out by hard-pressed working-class men than by a “gentleman thief.”

The final section takes the story into the postwar world, where the crime rate rose sharply despite the efforts of state initiatives such as the National Crime Prevention Campaign (1950–51) or the late-1960s advertising campaign, “Watch out! There's a thief about!” It seemed that neither official advice nor the products of the market could assuage public concerns about the apparent weakening of law and order. The emergence of the Cold War also provided a new set of symbolic contexts, and the final substantive chapter examines the phenomenon of the “spy-burglar” (185). While this practice raised issues rather different from those in the domestic environments explored elsewhere in the book, Moss shows how it added a new layer of cultural meaning to the burglary.

Night Raiders is a perceptive and entertaining work of historical recovery and cultural analysis. It is written with considerable panache—at times echoing the crime fiction that provides one of its sources—and unusually well illustrated, and its argument is underpinned by Moss's impressively detailed research in a range of different archives. Given the book's chronological scope, there are times when generalizations about burglary “penetrating into the everyday lives of Londoners” (207–8) or becoming entrenched in the national psyche remain a little elusive, and more could have been said about the tension between the often dramatic representation and usually mundane reality of this crime. Overall, though, this fine monograph demonstrates that there is still plenty that historians can mine from the seam of evidence about past breaches of the law.