A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  The trial was reported with a good deal of sensationalism, and Edith did not help herself by giving inconsistent and unhelpful evidence. And yet, a huge popular movement started to save her from the gallows. There was no evidence that she had planned the murder, and witnesses heard her crying ‘Don’t, don’t!’ during the attack. On top of that, she was referred to in court as ‘the adulteress’, and was forced to be tried alongside Bywaters rather than being judged on her own.

  A large segment of public opinion thought that these were rather Victorian assumptions to build into the justice system. Edith’s adultery or immorality did not automatically mean that she was guilty of murder, and if there was no evidence that she had prior knowledge of the attack, why should she share a dock with the killer? She was, however, found guilty, and hanged at Holloway Prison in 1923.

  The moral ambivalence of Edith Thompson, her composure, and her unknowable inner life all attracted Hitchcock. When he began to direct films, the behaviour of cool women under pressure formed a theme. So did murder. Yet only one of his films, Murder! (1930), is a classic whodunit in the mould of the Golden Age. In it, an actress is found sitting shocked, motionless and apparently red-handed next to the body of a murder victim. The story involves the slow realization, by a member of the jury at her trial, that she was in fact innocent.

  Yet the slowly unfolding solution of a mystery like this was a format that Hitchcock found too limiting. He was much more likely to use a murder as what in film parlance is called the ‘MacGuffin’, a means of kicking off a series of events in which bystanders are forced to reveal something about themselves. Hitchcock himself described a MacGuffin as ‘the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.’ What the MacGuffin might be is essentially unimportant. Hitchcock actually stated as much in an interview:

  It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’, and the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well’, the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands’. The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands’ …

  By then, the story has started. ‘So you see,’ Hitchcock concluded, ‘a MacGuffin is nothing at all.’ Murder, then, is essentially peripheral to Hitchcock’s work.

  Like Agatha Christie, Hitchcock did not depict actual murder or blood. In fact he couldn’t, because the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (usually known as The Hays Code) had tried to clean up the image of the cinema by censoring the violence and sex that could be seen on screen. Yet Hitchcock built up a condition of suspense in his viewer even more effectively by allowing them simply to imagine the bloodshed he could not show them.

  His first big success, The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog (1927), a silent film, already sowed the seeds of the classic Hitchcock films to come. It was based on a successful novel, loosely inspired by a ‘Jack the Ripper’-like serial killer, and the opening scenes of gaslights glowing through the fog along the Thames Embankment have a powerful echo of the ‘Ripper’ panic of 1888. The very first scene in The Lodger shows the face of a blonde woman screaming in terror, while the captions repeatedly hammer us with the words of her mysterious killer: ‘To-Night Golden Curls’. A series of blonde women have been murdered. But we see no more of her, or the killer. The emphasis is all upon the effects of murder, its ripples, and what happens to the witnesses, passers-by and to Londoners as a whole. Next, the woman who discovered the body is seen panicking, being reassured and being questioned greedily by a crowd.

  In another classic Hitchcock trick, the opening scenes use humour to relax the viewer. A man in the crowd spooks the distressed lady by covering his face with his coat and creeping up on her from behind. It’s amusing, but Hitchcock only makes us giggle in order to lull us into a state of relaxation so that the next shock will be more powerful.

  The story of The Lodger is really the story of the jeopardy into which the hero – played by matinee idol Ivor Novello – is placed by being suspected of the crime, and the catching of a killer and the resolution of wrongs was never Hitchcock’s concern. His authorized biographer, John Russell Taylor, told me that Hitchcock would have believed that ‘messages are for Western Union’, and that his films were not about good and evil, right or wrong. Instead, he simply aimed to extract maximum fear, horror and humour from his audience.

  In this, Hitchcock, although he lived and worked at the same time as Agatha Christie, has nothing to do with the Golden Age of detective fiction. Consciously or not, his work looks back to the ‘sensation’ novels of the 1860s. Hitchcock saw the cinema seat, according to John Russell Taylor, as a machine for ministering a series of shocks, laughs, shivers and screams to its occupant. In this, he was following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

  And, indeed, while Agatha Christie may come second only to William Shakespeare and the Bible in terms of sales, fiction of the Golden Age does not seem to provide the strongest and most influential strand of British culture inspired by crime. The ‘sensation’ novel of the 1860s, with its aim of raising the hair and shivering the spine, would eventually give us the younger, stronger, vigorous and still-thriving genre of thrilling horror. The Golden Age knitting-type detective puzzle, for all its great commercial success, turned out to be a dead end.

  Postscript

  ‘The Decline of English Murder’

  IN 1946, GEORGE Orwell published a celebrated essay lamenting ‘The Decline of English Murder’. At the time, he was still better known as a journalist and an essayist. His novel Animal Farm, published the previous year, had not yet turned him into one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, and 1984 still lay ahead of him. Orwell’s life, and writing career, was devoted to fighting totalitarianism on both the left and the right, and crime fiction interested him as an indirect expression of contemporary politics. ‘The average man,’ he claimed, ‘is not directly interested in politics and, when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals.’

  And he regretted what the new, nihilistic American hardboiled thrillers indicated about the tastes of his contemporaries. In particular, Orwell took against the thriller No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, a novel of 1939 which sold more than half a million copies. Although he was English, Chase modelled his style on the American writers of the Black Mask. Orwell complained that this novel, a runaway success in the first years of the Second World War, contained:

  eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another women with red-hot cigarette ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of-cruelty and much else of the same kind.

  He was not alone in his dislike of the book, which displeased many moralists in its depiction of a masochistic gangster who experiences an orgasm in the moment he gets knifed, and the unfortunate kidnap victim, Miss Blandish, who is beaten with a hose-pipe and raped before falling in love with her captor.

  Orwell thought this revealed an unhealthy taste for pain and inexplicable brutality that contrasted poorly even with the ‘snobbery and violence’ of the inter-war years. ‘Snobbishness,’ he wrote in another article, ‘like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.’

  This is the background to Orwell’s great elegiac essay. In it, he mourns the great murderers of the past in something of the same spirit of sardonic connoisseurship as Thomas De Quincey’s essay nearly 120 years before. Assessing the greatest crimes of the period 1850–1925, Orwell concludes that a ‘good’ murder involved members of the middle class, and usually had a sexual motive.

  And cert
ainly it seemed to him that the elegant crimes of the past were being replaced by a more brutal present: ‘the anonymous life of the dance halls and the false values of American film’.

  He picked out one particular true-life crime of 1944 known as ‘The Cleft Chin Murder’ as being typical of his own debased times. A male deserter from the US army and a female, 18-year-old, would-be striptease artist struck up a casual partnership. They killed a cyclist by running her over with a stolen army truck, before murdering a taxi driver (he of the cleft chin) for just eight pounds, which they spent at the dog races the next day. The crime was full of meaningless, wanton, arbitrary violence, and Orwell thought that it could only have occurred in the wartime year of 1944, with its atmosphere of movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, and the ‘brutalising effects of war’. One newspaper’s account of the trial in the Old Bailey was immediately followed up with an article headed ‘British Gangsterism Feared’. It was like a real-life version of Brighton Rock.

  Thomas De Quincey had praised the artistry and industry of John Williams, the supposed perpetrator of the Radcliffe Highway Killings, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. But George Orwell was rather more serious as he now held up Dr Palmer of Rugeley, or Edith Bywaters and Frederick Thompson, as admirable murderers. For at the very least, he argued, they had committed their crimes out of conviction. He thought that a crime of passion could have ‘dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer’. He regretted the passing of a stable, if unequal society, where people at least agreed that ‘crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them’. For Orwell, the monumental destruction of human life that the twentieth century had seen was eclipsing and erasing the pleasure formerly to be taken in reading about a single crime in suburbia.

  What Orwell feared would indeed come to pass. Pitiless, inhuman, random killings would be the flavour of fictional murder to come.

  IN THE SPRING of 2013, a packed audience spent their Friday night at the British Library. They’d come to ask questions of an all-female panel of crime writers. Most exciting of all, people wanted to meet Piv Bernth, producer of the cult, slow-burning Danish TV series The Killing, with its investigation into the horrific abduction and murder of a child. It was the same week that the ITV crime drama Broadchurch had begun, a kind of home-grown version of The Killing, set in Dorset. Both drew huge audiences, and discussion of ‘who did it’ in each case formed the common currency of office, dinner table and classroom chat across Britain in the same way that the details of Maria Marten’s death, or the details of Maria Manning’s guilt, had done more than one hundred years before.

  Equally, our interest in the characters and authors of the Victorian age is far from petering out. Sherlock Holmes has yet another new incarnation on the TV screen, so too do the events and players in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ case. Even the detective Jack Whicher has become the hero of a television drama series. But our modern depictions of violence have grown even nastier since the early days of the motion picture or even No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The first episode of 2012’s Ripper Street saw women being stripped naked, violently dismembered, and made to appear in snuff movies. This is fiction in the thriller genre, the meaner, younger brother of the detective story that has dominated since the Second World War. Yet the detective story is not quite dead, either, even in its cosy, domesticated, Golden Age form. Hercule Poirot is still just about in business on TV, as is the cuddlesome Foyle’s War.

  While many people might argue that the violence in modern fiction shows that society is sinking fast into depravity, our story has shown that our thirst for blood is in fact at least two hundred years old. But we’ve also seen that it is not timeless. ‘Scratch John Bull’, the archetypal red-faced, beer-drinking patriotic Englishman, proclaimed the Pall Mall Gazette in 1887, ‘and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dig deep into a murder, and devours the details of a hanging.’ While the ancient Briton might well have been of necessity a violent individual, though, he wasn’t particularly anxious about murder. He, and his descendants for many centuries, lacked the luxury of being able to worry about such a comparatively rare event. Famine, disease or war were far more pressing concerns.

  It was only with the turn of the nineteenth century that a new and awful significance became attached to the crime of murder, and that, in consequence, it took up its high position in art and culture. As we have seen, this fascination with murder can be ascribed to the limiting of the death penalty to fewer crimes, to the growth of literacy and to the creativity of writers like Thomas De Quincey. It came about because of city living, and with it the dissolution of the surveillance society of the village. It was due to the marvels of the modern age, such as easily available rat-poison and life-insurance. In other words, our elevation of murder above all other crimes and forms of violence was a consequence of what we like to think of as ‘civilization’.

  From 1800 onwards, with the birth of a recognizably modern world, enjoying murder became an increasingly profitable and commercial business. The character of the fictional detective is such a strong strand of modern life that the Victorians seem directly connected to us today in a way that the Georgians don’t, with their cheerfully rapscallion highwaymen, implausible Gothic novels, and policing by elderly volunteers. The Victorians are, indeed, our blood relatives.

  All through writing this book I’ve been worried about being too flippant about murder. It’s not all good clean fun. There is horror here, and tragedy, beneath the puppetry and pageantry. But among the gore and horror, we’ve also glanced aside at the history of literature, of education, of women’s place in society and of justice.

  Our guilty pleasures reveal a lot about who we really are. As the mystery novelist C. H. B. Kitchin presciently put it in 1939:

  If he wishes to study the manners of our age … a historian of the future will probably turn, not to blue books and statistics, but to detective stories.

  The draper’s shop run by the Marr family, in the Ratcliffe Highway, East London, scene of their slaughter in 1811. As De Quincey tells it, their maid, Margaret, heard the killer moving about within as she knocked in vain on the green door.

  A member of the Marine Police in his official-issue greatcoat, with his cutlass, lantern and gun. Rather like a private security guard, he had to prevent theft from the ships moored in the Port of London.

  Smartly dressed ‘Blue Devils’ or ‘Raw Lobsters’, as the constables of Robert Peel’s new Metropolitan Police Force were nicknamed. They wore blue on purpose to avoid confusion with the red coats of the army.

  Edwardian police officers demonstrating disguises for undercover work. Sherlock Holmes borrows his own skill in changing his appearance from the real-life Eugène Vidocq, the man behind the first official detective squad in France.

  Dragging the pond for the body of William Weare, 1823. The pond became one of the stops on the celebrated ‘Elstree Murder Tour’. The yellow gig, the vehicle in which the murderer travelled, is an emblem of this particular murder.

  This mug commemorates the murderer John Thurtell who killed William Weare and threw his body into the Elstree pond. Knick-knacks like this were often souvenirs from an enjoyable day out at a public hanging. Thurtell’s own was attended by 40,000 people.

  Madame Tussaud’s gallery of waxworks in Baker Street still contains a figure of its founder, the original Madame, who brought her travelling exhibition from Paris to London in 1802.

  Her exhibition specialized in celebrities of the French Revolution, royalty, and horror. She’d modelled the heads of its victims as they came off the guillotine, including those of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

  Broadsides about murderers usually featured a picture of the crime itself. Today they may look almost laughably naïve – note the lady’s severed legs in the coal scuttle – but contemporaries enjoyed their hard-hitting, horrific nature.

  A much more harrowing ima
ge of criminals at the gallows, by Théodore Géricault, 1820. It’s an unusual image because artists at a public hanging often concentrated on the spectacle of the vast crowd rather than those about to die.

  The inscription in this book reveals that Corder’s skin was removed and tanned by one of the surgeons at the Suffolk Hospital after his execution in Bury St Edmunds in 1828.

  This looks like an ordinary book about the life of William Corder, who committed ‘The Murder in the Red Barn’, but its extraordinary binding is made out of the skin of Corder himself.

  The most powerful of the many souvenirs from ‘The Murder in the Red Barn’: the scalp of its perpetrator,William Corder, with his little shrivelled ear at the bottom. The skin also retains a fuzz of short, ginger hair. It’s the star exhibit at Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds.

  Ceramic models of crime scenes, like ‘The Red Barn’ shown here, and figurines of the murderer and his victim, were displayed on many nineteenth-century mantelpieces.

  This marionette puppet of murder victim Maria Marten belonged to a travelling puppet show company that performed her death as a play in villages across East Anglia.

  You can tell that this puppet of Maria’s evil murderer, William Corder, is a villain, by his murderous-looking moustache and his heavy black eyeliner.