A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  a young doctor … educated in a very severe and critical medical school of thought, especially coming under the influence of Dr Bell of Edinburgh, who had most remarkable powers of observation. He prided himself that when he looked at a patient he could tell not only their disease but very often their occupation and place of residence.

  Bell was prominent among the younger generation of forensic medical scientists following on from Alfred Swaine Taylor and William Herapath. He had risen high in his field, was invited to attend upon Queen Victoria when she was in Scotland, and in later years would take considerable satisfaction in his reputation as the inspiration behind Sherlock Holmes.

  Conan Doyle’s genius was to combine Bell’s scientific approach with his own love of storytelling. His original plan had been to settle down happily into general practice as a doctor. Waiting in his surgery for the patients who failed to arrive, he started writing stories, and sent many of them off to magazines in a variety of genres: horror, mystery, ghost. But he struck gold only when he turned to detection.

  ‘I thought I would try my hand,’ he explains, in his audio recording, ‘at writing a story where the hero would treat crime in the way Dr Bell treated disease – and where science would take the place of chess. The result was Sherlock Holmes.’ A scene in A Study in Scarlet that swiftly follows the initial introductions shows Holmes as the heroic scientist, this time at work at the scene of a crime. The body itself had long been the site of study, but the location of the deed had only more recently come under scrutiny as a legitimate part of the work of a detective. Here Holmes was in his element, and ahead of his peers. He castigates the police detectives on site for trampling all over the muddy path outside the house and spoiling the evidence of the footprints of the murderer. ‘If a herd of buffaloes had passed along,’ he tells the policeman in charge, ‘there could not be a greater mess.’ It sets a pattern he would follow throughout the whole of his fictional career, railing against the blundering, ignorant, plodding professionals around whom he runs rings.

  Once inside, Holmes looks at the body in exactly the manner advised by Alfred Swaine Taylor, whose work Conan Doyle had read closely. Broadening out the study of material evidence, Holmes has also made a deep study of the different types of cigar ash, bicycle tyres and mud, all the better to read clues. When Holmes studies the corpse, Conan Doyle shows us his ‘nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling, pressing unbuttoning, examining’. This is quite in line, as the medical historian E. J. Wagner points out, with Taylor’s exhortation that:

  The first duty of a medical jurist is to cultivate a faculty of minute observation … He should observe everything which could throw a light on the production of wounds or other injuries found upon it. It should not be left to a policeman to say whether there were any marks of blood on the dress or on the hands of the deceased, or on the furniture of the room.

  Once the body is removed, Sherlock Holmes gets to work on the room itself, looking at every inch of the floor and ceiling for evidence:

  He whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat on his face … I was reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound … in one place he gathered up carefully a little pile of grey dust from the floor, and packed it away in an envelope.

  The idea of a SOCO, or ‘Scene of Crimes Officer’, is very familiar today, but in 1887 it was a novelty. It had never been seen before in literature, nor were readers even familiar with the theory behind the collecting of hair, dust and other seemingly trivial traces of evidence. The Sherlock Holmes stories would do a great deal for the popularization and professionalization of forensic science, so much so that the great French forsensic scientist Alexandre Lacassagne, who set up one of the first police labs at Lyons, would tell all his new recruits to read the great detective. ‘Fascinating technique’ was his verdict.

  But the most gripping thing about Sherlock Holmes is not so much his strength as his weakness. The supremely rational detective would have led a sad and arid life without his firm friend, admirer, cheerleader and chronicler, Dr Watson, who devoted himself to Holmes from the moment of their first meeting to the last.

  In one of the later Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, a near-perfect paradigm of the form published in the collection His Last Bow (1917), we see both Dr Watson’s warmth and Holmes’s coolness: it is the combination of the two that’s irresistible. In one immensely tender scene, the two friends stagger out of a room that Holmes has, in the interests of research, filled with poison gas. Sherlock Holmes may appear at first glance to be indomitable, but without his much more human friend he cannot navigate life:

  I dashed from my chair, threw my arms around Holmes, and together we lurched through the door …

  ‘Upon my word, Watson!’ said Holmes at last with an unsteady voice, ‘I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.’

  ‘You know,’ I answered with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes’s heart before, ‘that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.’

  He relapsed at once into the half-humorous, half-cynical vein which was his habitual attitude to those about him. ‘It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson,’ said he.

  Coming as it does toward the end of their lengthy friendship, truths long unspoken are at last expressed.

  ONCE THE SCIENCE of preserving and examining a crime scene had been established, the stage was set for new techniques to be employed in determining the identity of criminals and suspects. From 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act decreed that convicted criminals should be photographed for the purpose of future identification. But the huge volume of paper produced proved impractical for storage and record-keeping. Five years later, the rule was relaxed so that only ‘habitual’ criminals had mug shots taken.

  Yet this initiative to keep records of criminals would bear fruit in other ways. Prisoners leaving jail had to have their appearance and distinguishing marks recorded on cards, including the inky prints of their fingers. (Many convicts left poignantly faint imprints, the skin of their hands having been worn down by hard labour in jail.) These record cards contained a good deal of information intended to allow offenders to be identified if they went back to their old tricks. The cards employed a French technique of recording a set of standard body measurements. Under this Bertillon system of ‘anthropometric measurement’, the distance between the outside of the elbow and the tip of the middle finger, for example, or the diameter of the head, was recorded with metal callipers or gauges. The more measurements you took, the less the probability of two suspects having exactly the same ones.

  However, a team of British civil servants working in India refined the system down to its essential core. Exploiting the existing knowledge that every person has a unique pattern to his or her fingerprints, Edward Henry, the Inspector-General of the police in the province of Bengal, headed a team which established a system of classifying prints so that new ones could be matched to those in an existing database. He already knew that every person’s print was different. The innovation that made the discovery useful to the police lay in the record-keeping that allowed the information to be stored and accessed. Henry’s book on the new system was published in 1897, and it was adopted across the British Raj, though today credit is usually rightly given to Hemchandra Bose and Azizul Hacque, Henry’s Sub-Inspectors, for devising the means by which prints were given a numerical value, based firstly upon the main types of shape – loops, whirls and arches – then upon the variations in the curves and spacing of the lines.

  Henry’s work began to make a stir in law enforcement circles, and when he came back to London to become a commissioner at Scotland Yard in 1901 he established a new Fingerprint Bureau for the Metropolitan Pol
ice. (During Henry’s time as commissioner, he also oversaw the introduction of typewriters and police dogs to the force.) At this time, fingerprints were already being taken and stored, but only from prisoners.

  The earliest murder actually to be solved through the identification of fingerprints came in 1905, when two shopkeepers were found murdered in their shop in Deptford. A fingerprint on their cash box was linked to Alfred Stratton, one of two brothers suspected of the crime, and was used to place him firmly at the scene, and to convict him. But Sherlock Holmes, once again, was ahead of the police. A bloody fingerprint was central to the case in ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’, published two years earlier.

  However, the real strength of fingerprinting would lie in identifying whether or not suspects had previous criminal records. With the establishing of the Fingerprinting Bureau, all the preexisting prints of the prisoners taken under the Bertillon system had to be classified so that they could form a huge database which would now be added to every time suspects were brought in. The system survives to this day: every person arrested and charged with a serious offence has to give fingerprints, and the police are allowed to use reasonable force to make him or her do so. Only if the person is found ‘not guilty’ is the record destroyed.

  Methods continued to improve and resources to increase as the police instructed their rank and file in how to become better detectives. A training museum opened at Scotland Yard, a collection of artefacts, samples, weapons and even human remains compiled for the purpose of educating junior officers. It was modelled after a similar venture by Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857), the former criminal-turned-investigator who was responsible for the Sûreté, the French Security Brigade.

  Vidocq was a thief-turned-thief-taker in the eighteenth-century mould, and first went to prison at the age of 13. He made a living through fencing, working in a puppet theatre and playing the part of a cannibal in a travelling show before joining and then deserting the French army. At the age of 34, he decided to change sides, and gave up a life of crime to become a police informer. His background helped. ‘Adored by the thieves,’ he claims, ‘I could always rely on their devotion to me.’

  Within the police, Vidocq set up the Sûreté, a unit of investigators, or secret agents, that brought about many improvements in the science of detection, through the wearing of disguises, the keeping of records on criminals and even the casting of ‘footmarks’ in plaster (the term ‘footprints’ was only settled upon much later). However, Vidocq was tainted by his continued involvement in frauds and forgeries, and the French police were not keen to trumpet his achievements.

  He nevertheless found fame and fortune through his bestselling, if unreliable, ‘memoirs’. He was particularly celebrated for his skill in disguises. Vidocq could easily turn himself, for example, into ‘one of those good sexagenarian citizens whom all the old ladies admire’ with the help of ‘some false wrinkles, a pig-tail, snowy-white ruffles, a large gold-headed cane, a three-cornered hat, buckles, breeches and coat to match’. Detail was all: ‘if you would play a peasant, there must be dirt under the nails’. He also insisted that his operatives carry a number of different hats and scarves so as to change their appearance frequently, a technique still adopted by undercover policemen today. Sherlock Holmes, likewise a master of disguise, seems to have studied Vidocq’s methods.

  The Frenchman was also a born teacher, instructing his secret agents in ballistics and record-keeping as well as disguises. In later life, he visited London with his travelling exhibition of murderous weapons designed both to instruct and amuse. The poet Robert Browning went to see the show in 1851, and was taken round personally by Vidocq himself. He saw the ‘museum of knives & nails & hooks that have helped great murderers to their purposes … one little sort of dessert-knife did only take one life … “but then” says Vidocq, “it was the man’s own mother’s life, with fifty-two blows”’.

  Obviously a detective could learn a lot from such a man and such a museum, and in 1874 the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard established a collection of their own. The passing of the Prisoners’ Property Act five years previously had given the police the right to retain the possessions of criminals, and by 1875 the appointment of an inspector and a police constable to permanently man the ‘Prisoners’ Property Store’ suggests that the Scotland Yard museum had become something of a fixture. Its surviving visitors’ books show a steady stream of users between 1877 and 1894.

  It contained earlier exhibits, such as a letter written by Dr William Palmer, but the bulk of the collection was built up as cases were solved. There still remains, for example, evidence used to accuse John Robinson of the murder of Minnie Bonati in 1927. Robinson had boldly placed his victim’s dismembered body in a black wickerwork trunk deposited in the left-luggage room at Charing Cross station. The cloakroom ticket was put in the museum, as was a bloodstained matchstick. This latter was spotted in the wastepaper basket of the office where John Robinson had cut up the body. The evidence it provided of blood having been spilt on the premises, combined with the testimony of an acquaintance who’d been told that Robinson wanted his help to move an extremely heavy trunk ‘of books’, was Robinson’s undoing. No young detective who had heard the story would overlook a clue like a bloody matchstick in a wastepaper basket at the scene of a suspected crime.

  The Metropolitan Police today are understandably very careful about whom they let into their gruesome collection. After all, it does contain two death masks of Heinrich Himmler, a fridge belonging to the serial killer and necrophiliac Dennis Nilsen, and other objects destined to attract unwholesome interest. From the very start journalists and film crews (including our own) have been distinctly unwelcome, and even though the museum is officially called ‘The Crime Museum’, everyone uses quite a different name: ‘The Black Museum’, its colloquial title coined by a writer from the Observer in 1877, who had, like so many others, been refused access.

  18

  Revelations of a Lady Detective

  ‘I had not long been employed as a female detective, and now having given up my time and attention to what I may call a new profession, I was anxious to acquit myself as well and favourably as I could.’

  W. S. Hayward introduces his character Mrs Paschal in his story ‘The Mysterious Countess’ (n.d., probably 1864)

  IN DESCRIBING THE origins of his famous detective Mma Precious Ramotswe, Alexander McCall Smith has written that he chose a female as his lead because, if she were a man, ‘the conversation would be less interesting … less personal, less subjective – and less emotionally engaging’. McCall Smith is a compelling contemporary advocate for the pleasure to be found in following the success of a female detective. Readers take satisfaction in ‘seeing women, who have suffered so much from male arrogance and condescension, either outwitting men or demonstrating that they are just as capable as men of doing something that may have been seen as a male preserve’.

  He sees the female detective as often ‘the outsider in the male world of policing and criminal investigation’, a fertile place for a character to come up against the difficulties and tensions which provide the germ of fiction. And she can use her position on the margins to good effect: ‘We suddenly realise that it is the woman who has seen and understood what is happening without ever being suspected of being a threat to anybody.’

  While all this holds true of the great Mma Precious Ramotswe, though, it also applies to the earliest female detectives, who existed in fiction long before they did in real life.

  A great deal of debate has developed about the exact moment the first fictional female sleuth made her debut. It’s generally agreed that The Female Detective, published in 1864 (or possibly in 1861) by Andrew Forrester (the pen-name of James Redding Ware) was the first work in this new genre. His character, Mrs Gladden, investigates crimes in a professional capacity, and is paid for her services.

  Mrs Gladden tends to get all the attention, but she was preceded by earlier, if amateur, femal
e detectives, characters who accidentally fall into the role of solving a mystery. Some scholars make the case for a maidservant named Susan Hopley. Catherine Crowe published The Adventures of Susan Hopley, or Circumstantial Evidence, a novel in which the heroine solves a murder, as early as 1841. As an amateur female investigator, Susan Hopley developed out of the heroines of Gothic novels who had sought a means of exposing or escaping the evil villains who harassed them, just as Emily does in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

  But Hopley, the sleuthing maidservant, also looks forward to the fully-formed detective genre. She follows correct procedure in the gathering of evidence: ‘her most earnest desire’, for example, ‘was to go over the house that had been the scene of the catastrophe, and inspect every part of it’. She solves the crime with apparent effortlessness – the Athenaeum magazine noted that ‘through all the intricacies of the story, she winds her way with preternatural ease – the Dea Vindix [‘Avenging Goddess’] who unties all knots’. And Susan occupies the classic marginal position of a female detective: working as a servant, relatively powerless, she usually passes unnoticed and unsuspected. She is devoted to her duty of finding out the truth: at one point in her story, she is rewarded for her efforts by being sacked from her day job.

  Susan Hopley was a bestseller, and inspired a stage version, but in many ways she was ahead of her time, and aroused consternation as well as admiration. Detective fiction, let alone detective fiction with a female heroine, was not yet well understood. ‘We hardly know what to say of this book’, wrote one critic:

  It perplexes us extremely. It is powerful, beyond all question; but unsatisfactory … precisely as in real life, facts and recollections of apparently the most trivial kind, which have got remotely away in some inaccessible corner of the memory, come gradually out into more and more prominence, until, some last link in a long chain of occurrences wanting, they suddenly and thoroughly supply it. The writer, in a word, has the art of reality. You are struck with the trifling minutenesses, yet find them not so trifling as you first supposed.