Their father, John Henry Sugden (1914–1996), was a painter and decorator,[1][2] whose seasonal trade made him vulnerable to spells of unemployment and short hours; their mother, Lily (née Cuthbertson, 1914–1981), eventually took part-time factory work to keep the boys at school.
[1][2] As John Sugden remarked in his preface to Amy's Last Flight (p. 4), his brother's "trademarks" were "the patient collection of relevant evidence, the even-handed and fearless evaluation of primary sources, and an inherent sympathy for those who had lived in other times and circumstances."
Then plunder the books, the newspapers, and, if the budget will stretch to it, the Ripper files at the Public Record Office, for facts which can be bullied into investing your fantasy with a veneer of plausibility.
And it was specifically for them that I wrote my Complete History.Sugden's book did not set out to name Jack the Ripper, but to painstakingly reconstruct the crimes within the context of the London of 1888, and to establish as accurate a record as possible.
[2] Throughout his life, Sugden's interests were wide-ranging and he spoke authoritatively about numerous subjects, including natural history (especially fishes and the conservation movement),[2] American frontier history, piracy and privateering, the Age of Discovery, crime in 18th-century London,[2] the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Hannibal, popular music (particularly American punk rock) and French cinema.
Sugden's greatest work was, however, his study of the career of the English criminal Jack Sheppard and the London underworld of the early 18th century.
A work of a different and lighter kind, produced jointly with his brother, was a sprawling epistolary novel based on imaginary communities in contemporary Hull and Yorkshire.