It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the NEWS OF THE WORLD. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.
The opening passage of George Orwell’s 1946 Tribune essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, was much quoted earlier this year by journalists keen to highlight the importance of the recently deceased News of the World to the traditional English Sunday afternoon. This essay has always been a favourite of mine. When I was growing up, classic crime books lined the walls of my house, and I was versed in the traditions of the English murder from a young age; on family days out, my dad would point out the house where Dr Buck Ruxton cut up his wife and housemaid, and other such sites.
One shelf in the lounge always stood out; it was filled with Penguin True Crime editions. With their typically iconic red and black striped spines, they stood out among the editions of ‘classic British trials’ and so on, and my young eyes were unavoidably drawn to them. Over the years, I have built up my own collection of these books, from charity shops, or 1p purchases from Amazon. Predominantly, these editions focus on crimes from what Orwell may have described as the ‘classic era’ of British murder: domestic dramas in middle class homes, from the late Victorian era through to the Second World War. Occasionally, the publishers cast their eyes across the Atlantic, with an account of the Manson Family trial by the chief prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, or a history of Lizzie Borden’s crimes (unproven), but the identity of the series was essentially English. The recurring themes of the books are family jealousy, and the need to preserve face, to a degree when arsenic was a preferable alternative to the decree nisi. The best would also include an air of mystery, a crime unproven or a verdict doubted.
Although the series was published between 1988-91, most of the books were reprints of earlier works. As a result, they tend to adopt a comfortable, patrician tone which eschews sensationalism of any kind, sounding instead more like a fireside lecture (fans of this authorial voice will also be charmed by the sub-genre of pathologists’ memoirs, exemplified by Dr Keith Simpson’s ‘Forty Years of Murder’). Whilst there are again some exceptions, such as campaigning left-wing journalist Paul Foot, most of the authors have the air of the gentleman amateur about them, rendering the goriest of murders strangely suitable for bedtime reading.
The first book in the series which I read was Donald Rumbelow’s ‘Complete Jack the Ripper’. This is still considered an essential book for Ripperologists, and was quoted in a disproportionate number of my Undergraduate essays. A former London policeman himself, Rumbelow undertakes a disinterested examination of the evidence, undercutting sensational theories, and also placing the events in the context of East End political and social upheaval. Rumbelow also contributed a further book on the Houndsditch murders and the Siege of Sydney Street, brilliantly investigating this little-known (nowadays) incident in 1910, lifting the lid on émigré anarchist groups which blossomed in turn of the century London.
(SYDNEY STREET SIEGE) (aka SIDNEY STREET SIEGE)
Footage from the Siege of Sidney Street
These books are great examples of the skilled crime writer’s ability to use murder to shine the light on the social context of the incidents they are investigating. This is an essential aspect of the True Crime series, whether it be the anarchist societies of London (also seen in 'Stinie: Murder On The Common'), or the role of women (‘The Poisoned Life of Mrs Maybrick’, or ‘Suddenly At The Priory’, which explored the murderous intrigues which could surround the figure of a wealthy young Victorian widow).
These crimes were sensations in their day. Judith Flanders’s recent overview ‘The Invention of Murder’ describes the way in which Victorians immortalised their notorious criminals through theatre, pamphlets and waxworks, which the tabloid press boomed in the early twentieth century thanks to its tireless court reportage. Killers such as ‘Acid Bath’ Haigh were sensationalised every bit as much as modern murderers such as the self-proclaimed ‘Crossbow Cannibal’. However, they have now dropped largely off the radar.
Modern crime fiction is enjoying a boom; whilst Scandinavian and American authors invent serial killers working to occult methodology, British writers have been getting their hands dirty in the murky world of 70s gangland, dredging up memories of Harry Roberts and the Krays. The invention and quality of many of these novels is at odds with the state of true crime writing. Reading Cathi Unsworth’s excellent novelisation of the Jack The Stripper murders, ‘Bad Penny Blues’, I was pleased to see a number of familiar texts in the acknowledgements, such as John Pearson’s classic ‘The Profession of Violence’. I was also familiar with the source texts on the Stripper crimes though; ‘Found Naked and Dead’ and ‘Jack of Jumps’, both of which are spectacularly misogynistic and distasteful, with all the charm of a 1970’s police station locker room. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher broke the mould by returning to the traditions exemplified by the Penguin series; the family conflict, the uncertain outcome, the investigator’s minute examination of a family’s private allegiances and routines. It was a shining light among the Mad Frankie Fraser biographies*.
Nowadays, American serial killers dominate the bookshelves and the cinema screens, with only the illiterate memoirs of football thugs and nightclub bouncers to compete. Genuinely interesting cases, such as that of Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox, are ill-served by rush released books made up of newspaper clippings. I’m a bit of a sucker for criminal profiler memoirs, but have lost count of the number of people who claim to have been Thomas Harris’s main contact in the writing of the Hannibal Lector novels. Whilst aware that we are discussing human life and its abrupt curtailment, the random, casual acts of violence inflicted by American serial killers hold little interest compared to the webs of intrigue which surround the classic English murder.
These criminals are far from remarkable. Crushed by the pressures of conformity, boiling with impotent rage, they scheme and plot; the easy availability of deadly poisons in Victorian England proves an irresistible temptation. Living in close proximity to their victims is a dreadful strain, pushing their nerves to breaking point and leading to often bizarre behaviour (Crippen fleeing the country with his lover disguised as a young boy). Likewise, the police officers are reassuringly human, their investigations illuminating the dark corners of suburbia. With no CSI labs to fall back on, the intuition of Detectives such as Abbeline and Walter Dew pokes into the darker side of human nature, searching out motive and opportunity
Overall, I think the most fitting recommendation for these books, and a suitable introduction to their tone, comes from John Dickson Carr, in his foreward to ‘Suddenly at the Priory’:
‘When murder-fanciers draw up their chairs to the fire, each settling himself to a night-long discussion of their favourite homicide, there always enters a ghostly procession of what the late William Roughhead called ‘the Lost Ladies’. In fact, you can seldom have a good case without a fascinating woman. They distract us as much in debate as they do in real life. Shadowy, smiling, they glide in and lean across our chairs. Was she guilty? Was she not guilty? Did she think about murder – but refrain? She may have died on a scaffold one hundred years ago, or drawn her last breath yesterday under a (figurative) heap of lilies. It doesn’t matter. We still pound the table and yell.
All these events take place against the starchiest background of Victorian respectability. Behind lace curtains lurks demoniac possession, and a twilight conservatory is a-buzz with lies and murder.’
Whilst Donald Rumbelow is one of the best exponents of the old-fashioned crime writer’s art, the cases he describes are relatively atypical. For an investigation of what Orwell would describe as a perfect murder, I would recommend John Williams’s ‘Suddenly at the Priory’, or Richard Whittigton-Egan’s ‘The Riddle Of Birdhouse Rise’, a complex Victorian poisoning case also notable for the author’s over-enthusiasm as an amateur detective, badgering the perpetrator’s descendents almost half a century on. John Cornwell’s ‘Earth to Earth’ is a deeply strange depiction of life and death on a Devonshire farm which had been untouched by progress for almost 600 years, whilst PD James’s The Maul and The Pear Tree is a masterful account of the early Victorian Ratcliff Highway Murders. All are available for pennies from the usual online sources.
*Incidentally, Frankie Fraser does not appear half as unbalanced as he claims. Most of his behaviour is extremely predictable.
No comments:
Post a Comment