DETECTIVE: MISS GLADDEN (ALIAS)
THE UNRAVELED MYSTERY
Andrew Forrester, Jr.
ARGUABLY THE FIRST WOMAN IN LITERATURE to take employment as a private detective is Miss Gladden (not her real name, merely, she writes, “the name I assume most frequently while in my business”), often referred to simply as “G.” She enters the stage in The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew Forrester, Jr., the pseudonym of James Redding Ware (1832–1909). The best evidence of its preeminence indicates that this rare book was first published in May 1864, while the anonymously published Revelations of a Lady Detective, long regarded as its predecessor, was published several months later. Both books were preceded by the near-detective volume Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy by Edward Ellis, a “penny dreadful” issued in fifty-two parts in 1862–1863.
Ware’s decision to write about a female private investigator was extraordinary, as no such career was open to women in England at the time of his book. As the first-person narrator, “G” is not intent on breaking down barriers, merely attempting to avoid genteel poverty. It is fortunate that she is intuitive, as many elements of her cases rely on intuition and coincidence, though she does occasionally make deductions based on observation.
As Forrester, James Redding Ware also wrote Revelations of a Private Detective (1863) and Secret Service, or Recollections of a City Detective (1864). A book frequently listed in his bibliography, The Private Detective, is simply a later reprint of Revelations of a Private Detective. Ware was a prolific playwright and wrote several other books under his own name that did not involve crime (his works covered such topics as dreams, board games, and English slang) until he produced another collection of purportedly true-life experiences, Before the Bench: Sketches of Police Court Life (1880).
“The Unraveled Mystery” was originally published in The Female Detective (London, Ward & Lock, 1864).
The Unraveled Mystery
ANDREW FORRESTER, JR.
WE, MEANING THEREBY SOCIETY, are frequently in the habit of looking at a successful man, and while surveying him, think how fortunate he has found life, how chances have opened up to him, and how lucky he has been in drawing so many prizes.
We do not, or we will not, see the blanks which he may have also drawn. We look at his success, thinking of our own want of victories, shut our eyes to his failures, and envy his good fortune instead of emulating his industry. For my part I believe that no position or success comes without that personal hard work which is the medium of genius. I never will believe in luck.
When this habit of looking at success and shutting our eyes to failure is exercised in reference, not to a single individual, but to a body, the danger of coming to a wrong conclusion is very much increased.
This argument is very potent in its application to the work of the detective. Because there are many capital cases on record in which the detective has been the mainspring, people generally come to the conclusion that the detective force is made up of individuals of more than the average power of intellect and sagacity.
Just as the successful man in any profession says nothing about his failures, and allows his successes to speak for themselves, so the detective force experiences no desire to publish its failures, while in reference to successes detectives are always ready to supply the reporter with the very latest particulars.
In fact, the public see the right side only of the police embroidery, and have no idea what a complication of mistakes and broken threads there are on the wrong.
Nay, indeed, the public in their admiration of the public successes of the detective force very generously forget their public failures, which in many instances are atrocious.
To what cause this amiability can be attributed it is perhaps impossible to say, but there is a great probability that it arises from the fact that the public have generally looked upon the body as a great public safeguard—an association great at preventing crime.
Be this as it may, it is certain that the detective force is certainly as far from perfect as any ordinary legal organization in England.
But the reader may ask why I commit myself to this statement, damaging as it is to my profession.
My answer is this, that in my recent days such a parliamentary inquiry (of a very brief nature, it must be conceded) has been made into the uses and customs of the detective force, as must have led the public to believe that this power is really a formidable one, as it affects not only the criminal world but society in general.
It had appeared as though the English detectives were in the habit of prying into private life, and as though no citizen were free from a system of spydom, which if it existed would be intolerable, but which has an existence only in imagination.
It is a great pity that the minister who replied to the inquiry should have so faintly shown that the complaint was faint, if not altogether groundless.
I do not suppose the public will believe me with any great amount of faith, and simply because I am an interested party; yet I venture to assert that the detective forces as a body are weak; that they fail in the majority of the cases brought under their supervision; and finally, that frequently their most successful cases have been brought to perfection, not by their own unaided endeavours so much as by the use of facts, frequently stated anonymously, and to which they make no reference in finally giving their evidence. This evidence starts from the statement, “from information I received.” Those few words frequently enclose the secret which led to all the after operations which the detective deploys in description, and without which secret his evidence would never have been given at all.
The public, especially that public who have experienced any pressure of the continental system of police, and who shudder at the remembrance of the institution, need have no fear that such a state of things municipal can ever exist in England. It could not be attempted as the force is organized, and it could not meet with success were the constitution of the detective system invigorated, and in its reformed character pressed upon English society, for it would be detected at once as unconstitutional, and resented accordingly.
With these remarks I will to the statement I have to make concerning my part, that of a female detective, in the attempt to elucidate a criminal mystery which has never been cleared up, which from the mode in which it was dealt with, ran little chance of being discovered, and which will now never be explained.
The simple facts of the case, and necessary to be known, are these—
One morning, a Thames boatman found a carpet-bag resting on the abutment of an arch of one of the Thames bridges. This treasure-trove being opened, was found to contain fragments of a human body—no head.
The matter was put into the hands of the police, an inquiry was made, and nothing came of it.
This result was very natural.
There was little or no intellect exercised in relation to the case. Facts were collected, but the deductions that might have been drawn from them were not made, simply because the right men were not set to work to—to sort them, if I may be allowed that expression.
The elucidation, as offered by me at the time, and which was in no way acted upon, was due—I confess it at first starting—not to myself, but to a gentleman who put me in possession of the means of submitting my ultimate theory of the case to the proper authorities.
I was seated one night, studying a simple case enough, but which called for some plotting, when a gentleman applied to see me, with whom I was quite willing to have an interview, though I did not even remotely recognise the name on the card which was sent in to me.
As of course I am not permitted to publish his name, and as a false one would be useless, I will call him Y——.
He told me, in a few clear, curt words, very much like those of a detective high in office, and who has attained his position by his own will, that he knew I was a detective, and wanted to consult with me.
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“Oh, very well, if I am a detective, you can consult with me. You have only yourself to please.”
He then at once said that he had a theory of the Bridge mystery, as he called it and as I will call it, and that he wanted this theory brought under the consideration of the people at Scotland Yard.
So far I was cautious, asking him to speak.
He did so, and I may say at once that at the end of a minute I threw off the reserve I had maintained and became frank and outspoken with my visitor.
I will not here reproduce his words, because if I did so I should afterwards have to go through them in order to interpolate my own additions, corrections, or excisions.
It is perhaps sufficient to say that his entire theory was based upon grounds relating to his profession as a medical man. Therefore, whenever a statement is made in the following narrative which smacks of the surgery, the reader may fairly lay its origin to Y—— while, on the other hand, the generality of the conclusions drawn from these facts are due to myself.
I shall therefore put the conversations we had at various times in the shape of a perfected history of the whole of them, with the final additions and suggestions in their proper places, though they may have occurred at the very commencement of the argument.
As our statement stood, as it was submitted to the authorities, so now it is laid before the public, official form and unnecessary details alone being excised.
1. The mutilated fragments did not when placed together form anything like an entire body, and the head was wanting.
The first fact which struck the medical man was this, that the dissection had been effected, if not with learning, at least with knowledge. The severances were not jagged, and apparently the joints of the body had not been guessed at. The knife had been used with some knowledge of anatomy.
The inference to be drawn from these facts was this, that whoever the murderer or homicide might be, either he or an accessory, either at or after the fact, was inferentially an educated man, from the simple discovery that there was evidence he knew something of a profession (surgery) which presupposes education.
Now, it is an ordinary rule, in cases of murder where there are two or more criminals, that these are of a class.
That is to say, you rarely find educated men (I am referring here more generally to England) combine with uneducated men in committing crime. It stands evident that criminals in combination presupposes companionship. This assertion accepted, or allowed to stand for the sake of argument, it then has to be considered that all companionship generally maintains the one condition of equality. This generality has gained for itself a proverb, a sure evidence of most widely-extended observation, which runs—“Birds of a feather flock together.”
Very well. Now, where do we stand in reference to the Bridge case, while accepting or allowing the above suppositions?
We arrive at this conclusion—
That the state of the mutilated fragments leads to the belief that men of some education were the murderers.
2. The state of the tissue of the flesh of the mutitilated fragments showed that the murder had been committed by the use of the knife.
This conclusion was very easily arrived at.
There is no need to inform the public that the blood circulates through the whole system of veins and arteries in about three minutes, or that nothing will prevent blood from coagulating almost immediately it has left the veins. To talk of streams of blood is to speak absurdly.
If, therefore, an artery is cut, and the heart continues to beat for a couple of minutes after the wound is made, the blood will be almost pumped out of the body, and the flesh, after death, will in appearance bear that relation to ordinary flesh that veal does to ordinary beef—a similar process of bleeding having been gone through with the calf, that of exhausting the body of its blood.
What was the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the fragments showed by their condition that the murdered man had been destroyed by the use of the knife?
The true conclusion stood thus—that he was murdered by foreigners.
For if we examine a hundred consecutive murders and homicides, committed in England by English people, we shall find that the percentage of deaths from the use of the knife is so small as barely to call for observation. Strangling, beating, poisoning (in a minor degree)—these are the modes of murder adopted in England.
The conclusion, then, may stand that the murder was committed by foreigners.
I am aware that against both the conclusions at which I have arrived it might be urged that educated and uneducated men have been engaged in the same crime; and secondly, that murders by the knife are perpetrated in England.
But in all cases of mystery, if they are to be solved at all, it is by accepting probabilities as certainties, so far as acting upon them is concerned.
3. There was further evidence than supposition to show that the remains were those of a foreigner.
This evidence is divided into a couple of branches. The first depends upon the evidence of the pelves, or hip bones, which formed a portion of the fragments; the second upon the evidence of the skin of the fragments.
First—
It may be remarked by anyone of experience that there is this distinctive difference between foreigners and Englishmen, and one which may be seen in the Soho district any day—that while the hips of foreigners are wider than those of Englishmen, foreign shoulders are not so broad as English; hence it results that while foreigners, by reason of the contrast, look generally wider at the hips than shoulders, Englishmen, for the greater part, look wider at the shoulders than the hips.
This distinction can best be observed in contrasting French and English, or German and English soldiery. Here you find it so extremely evident as not to admit discussion.
Now, was there any evidence in the fragments to which this comparative international argument could apply?
Yes.
The medical gentleman who examined the fragments deposed that they belonged to a slightly-built man. Then followed this remarkable statement, that the hip bones, or pelves, were extremely large.
The second branch of this evidence, relating to the skin, may now be set out.
The report went on to say that the skin was covered with long, strong, straight black hairs.
Now it is very remarkable that the skin should exhibit those appearances which are usually associated with strength, while the report distinctly sets out that the fragments belonged to a slightly-built man.
It strikes the most ordinary thinker at once that his experience tells him that slight, weakly made men are generally distinguishable for weak and thin hair. Most men at once recognise the force of the poetical description of Samson’s strength lying in his hair.
There is, then, surely something contradictory in the slight build, and the long, strong black hair, if we judge from our ordinary experience. But if we carry our experience beyond the ordinary, if we go into a French or Italian eating-house in the Soho district, it will be found that scarcely a man is to be found who is destitute of strong hair, for the most part black, upon the face. It need not be added that hair thickly growing on the face is presumptive proof that the entire skin possesses that faculty, the palms of the hands and soles of the feet excepted.*1
Now follows another intricate piece of evidence. The hairs are stated to be long, black, and strong—that is to say, black, thick, and without any curl in them.
Any man who, by an hospital experience, has seen many English human beings, will agree with me that the body hair here in England is rarely black, rarely long, and generally with a tendency to curl.
Now, go to the French and Italian cafés already referred to, and it will be found that the beards you shall see are black, very strong, and the hairs individually straight.
The third conclusion stands thus:
That the bones and skin of the fragments point to their having formed a portion of a foreigner rather than an Englishman.
EVIDENCE OF THE FRAGMENTS. The evidence of the fragments, therefore, goes problematically to prove that the murdered man was an educated foreigner, stabbed to death by one or more educated foreigners.
Now, what evidence can be offered which can support this theory?
Much.
In the first place, the complaints of the French Government to England, and the results of those complaints, very evidently show that London is the resting-place of many determined foreigners. In fact, it is a matter beyond all question, that London has at all times been that sanctuary for refugees from which they could not be torn.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 5
