Selección Terror: Asesinatos en el Soho

About this issue

Asesinatos en el Soho ("Murders in Soho"), this 1981 Spanish-language terror pulp serial by Clark Carrados, opens in Victorian London on a rainy Saturday evening. Jennifer Balsam, a modiste on Frith Street in Soho, dismisses her six young seamstresses early, noting the unsafe streets. Her lead worker, nineteen-year-old Agnes Lange, departs to meet her medical intern boyfriend at Charing Cross Road. Alone at home, Agnes is brutally murdered in her bedroom by an unseen assailant wielding a blade—her throat slashed, her body repeatedly stabbed across multiple wounds in a frenzy of violence. The narrative then shifts to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where Doctors Hastings and Ashford discuss the murder. Ashford, the hospital's medical examiner, reveals he performed Agnes's autopsy: the victim was found in her home, not sexually assaulted but savagely mutilated post-mortem. Detective Superintendent Howard investigates, with no suspect yet identified. The story establishes the mystery of an apparently motiveless, extraordinarily brutal killer.