by Graeme Davis
“Many months afterwards—near a year afterwards—there was a bank in Ireland robbed of seven thousand pounds, by a person of the name of Doctor Dundey, who escaped to America; from which country some of the stolen notes came home. He was supposed to have bought a farm in New Jersey. Under proper management, that estate could be seized and sold, for the benefit of the parties he had defrauded. I was sent off to America for this purpose.
“I landed at Boston. I went on to New York. I found that he had lately changed New York paper money for New Jersey paper money,†††††† and had banked cash in New Brunswick. To take this Doctor Dundey, it was necessary to entrap him into the State of New York, which required a deal of artifice and trouble. At one time, he couldn’t be drawn into an appointment. At another time, he appointed to come to meet me, and a New York officer, on a pretext I made; and then his children had the measles. At last he came, per steamboat, and I took him, and lodged him in a New York prison called the Tombs;‡‡‡‡‡‡ which I dare say you know, sir?”
Editorial acknowledgment to that effect.
“I went to the Tombs, on the morning after his capture, to attend the examination before the magistrate. I was passing through the magistrate’s private room, when, happening to look round me to take notice of the place, as we generally have a habit of doing, I clapped my eyes, in one corner, on a—Carpet Bag.
“What did I see upon that Carpet Bag, if you’ll believe me, but a green parrot on a stand, as large as life!
“‘That Carpet Bag, with the representation of a green parrot on a stand,’ said I, ‘belongs to an English Jew, named Aaron Mesheck, and to no other man, alive or dead!’
“I give you my word the New York Police Officers were doubled up with surprise.
“‘How did you ever come to know that?’ said they.
“‘I think I ought to know that green parrot by this time,’ said I; ‘for I have had as pretty a dance after that bird, at home, as ever I had, in all my life!’”
“And was it Mesheck’s?” we submissively inquired.
“Was it, sir? Of course it was! He was in custody for another offence, in that very identical Tombs, at that very identical time. And, more than that! Some memoranda, relating to the fraud for which I had vainly endeavoured to take him, were found to be, at that moment, lying in that very same individual—Carpet Bag!”
Such are the curious coincidences and such is the peculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circumstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have, from day to day and year to year, to set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise, and to keep pace with every such invention that comes out. In the Courts of Justice, the materials of thousands of such stories as we have narrated—often elevated into the marvellous and romantic, by the circumstances of the case—are dryly compressed into the set phrase, “in consequence of information I received, I did so and so.” Suspicion was to be directed, by careful inference and deduction, upon the right person; the right person was to be taken, wherever he had gone, or whatever he was doing to avoid detection: he is taken; there he is at the bar; that is enough. From information I, the officer, received, I did it; and, according to the custom in these cases, I say no more.
These games of chess, played with live pieces, are played before small audiences, and are chronicled nowhere. The interest of the game supports the player. Its results are enough for justice. To compare great things with small, suppose Le Verrier or Adams§§§§§§ informing the public that from information he had received he had discovered a new planet; or Columbus informing the public of his day that from information he had received he had discovered a new continent; so the Detectives inform it that they have discovered a new fraud or an old offender, and the process is unknown.
Thus, at midnight, closed the proceedings of our curious and interesting party. But one other circumstance finally wound up the evening, after our Detective guests had left us. One of the sharpest among them, and the officer best acquainted with the Swell Mob, had his pocket picked, going home!
* Founded in 1749, the Bow Street Runners were London’s first police force. They were amalgamated with the Metropolitan Police in 1839, and a new “Detective Branch” was formed in 1842.
† Probably the Lyceum.
‡ The “fairy extravaganzas” of British dramatist James Robinson Planché and others were popular at the time. The genre began in Paris in the early 19th century, and combined dance, drama, and acrobatics with extravagant costumes and special effects.
§ Probably Inspector Charles Frederick Field.
¶ An 1811 painting by Scottish artist Sir David Wilkie.
# Young, male thieves and pickpockets who imitated “swells” (society gentlemen) in their dress and manners, to throw their victims off guard.
** An expert. The more usual expression is “a dab hand.”
†† A burglar or safecracker.
‡‡ A “gonoph” was a pickpocket or thief in the underworld slang of that time.
§§ Meaning unknown. Possibly derived from the French couper, “to cut.”
¶¶ Confidence trickster.
## Conned. “Gammon!” was a common rebuttal of the time, meaning “nonsense!”
*** A chase after an accused thief or other criminal.
††† i.e. the wax seal, normally applied to the back of a letter.
‡‡‡ A kind of groom, employed by an inn to look after guests’ horses.
§§§ In Victorian underworld slang, a “plant” was a victim. Wield uses the word to cast the criminal Fikey as the victim of Wield’s own deception.
¶¶¶ A kind of bond secured against a company’s assets.
### The south bank of the Thames, as it flows through London.
**** A light, two-wheeled, open carriage. “Shay” is a corruption of the French chaise.
†††† An outfit.
‡‡‡‡ Give a bill or I.O.U.
§§§§ By God. An alternative form of “egad.”
¶¶¶¶Linen.
#### London’s central financial and business district.
***** The tap-room, or bar-room.
††††† A number.
‡‡‡‡‡ “Oh, Lord!”
§§§§§ Just fine.
¶¶¶¶¶ Sent to the penal colonies in Australia.
##### Talkative
****** “he defeated me.”
†††††† At that time, U.S. states and many banks issued their own paper money, in addition to Federal bills.
‡‡‡‡‡‡ The New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention, in Five Points, Manhattan.
§§§§§§ Working separately, Le Verrier in France and Adams in England predicted the existence and position of Neptune mathematically.
THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT
(EXTRACT)
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
1861
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London in 1835. Her parents separated when she was five years old, and her mother saw to her education. She dabbled with acting and actually supported herself and her mother for three years by playing minor roles on the London stage.
In 1860, she met the publisher John Maxwell. He was married with five children, but his wife was confined to an asylum. Mary moved in with him, acting as stepmother to his children until 1874, when Maxwell’s wife died and the two were able to marry. They went on to have six children of their own.
Mary’s first novel, Three Times Dead; or, The Secret of the Heath, was published the same year she met Maxwell. She went on to write more than eighty novels, many—including her best-known work, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)—in the popular “sensation fiction” style
.
Sales of Three Times Dead were poor, and on Maxwell’s advice a condensed and revised version was published in 1861 as The Trail of the Serpent. Hailed by some as the first British detective novel, The Trail of the Serpent shows its roots in sensation fiction. Its dense plot involves murder, insanity, suicide, impersonation, lust, blackmail, abandoned offspring, and a jailbreak as its villain schemes to gain control of an aristocratic fortune. The rightful heir, Richard Marwood, is framed for the murder of his uncle and pleads insanity to avoid the noose while his friends work to expose the true culprit: an orphaned schoolmaster named Jabez North.
The book’s climax sees the mute detective Joseph Peters—an interesting character who would certainly anchor a series of titles in today’s market—in Liverpool, along with Augustus Darley, a typical English “jolly good fellow” of the time, and Jim Stilson, a publican and former prizefighter known as the Left-handed Smasher. Jabez North—who has been masquerading as Raymond, Count de Marolles—plans to flee to America, and the three must pick up his trail.
Three days after the above conversation, three gentlemen were assembled at breakfast in a small room in a tavern overlooking the quay at Liverpool. This triangular party consisted of the Smasher, in an elegant and simple morning costume, consisting of tight trousers of Stuart plaid, an orange-coloured necktie, a blue checked waistcoat, and shirt-sleeves. The Smasher looked upon a coat as an essentially outdoor garment, and would no more have invested himself in it to eat his breakfast than he would have partaken of that refreshment with his hat on, or an umbrella up. The two other gentlemen were Mr. Darley, and his chief, Mr. Peters, who had a little document in his pocket signed by a Lancashire magistrate, on which he set considerable value. They had come across to Liverpool as directed by the telegraph, and had there met with the Smasher, who had received letters for them from London with the details of the escape, and orders to be on the look-out for Peters and Gus. Since the arrival of these two, the trio had led a sufficiently idle and apparently purposeless life. They had engaged an apartment overlooking the quay, in the window of which they were seated for the best part of the day, playing the intellectual and exciting game of all-fours. There did not seem much in this to forward the cause of Richard Marwood. It is true that Mr. Peters was wont to vanish from the room every now and then, in order to speak to mysterious and grave-looking gentlemen, who commanded respect wherever they went, and before whom the most daring thief in Liverpool shrank as before Mr. Calcraft* himself. He held strange conferences with them in corners of the hostelry in which the trio had taken up their abode; he went out with them, and hovered about the quays and the shipping; he prowled about in the dusk of the evening, and meeting these gentlemen also prowling in the uncertain light, would sometimes salute them as friends and brothers, at other times be entirely unacquainted with them, and now and then interchange two or three hurried gestures with them, which the close observer would have perceived to mean a great deal. Beyond this, nothing had been done—and, in spite of all this, no tidings could be obtained of the Count de Marolles, except that no person answering to his description had left Liverpool either by land or water. Still, neither Mr. Peters’s spirits nor patience failed him; and after every interview held upon the stairs or in the passage, after every excursion to the quays or the streets, he returned as briskly as on the first day, and reseated himself at the little table by the window, at which his colleagues—or rather his companions, for neither Mr. Darley nor the Smasher were of the smallest use to him—played, and took it in turns to ruin each other from morning till night. The real truth of the matter was, that, if anything, the detective’s so-called assistants were decidedly in his way; but Augustus Darley, having distinguished himself in the escape from the asylum, considered himself an amateur Vidocque;† and the Smasher, from the moment of putting in his left, and unconsciously advancing the cause of Richard and justice by extinguishing the Count de Marolles, had panted to write his name, or rather make his mark, upon the scroll of fame, by arresting that gentleman in his own proper person, and without any extraneous aid whatever. It was rather hard for him, then, to have to resign the prospect of such a glorious adventure to a man of Mr. Peters’s inches; but he was of a calm and amiable disposition, and would floor his adversary with as much good temper as he would eat his favourite dinner; so, with a growl of resignation, he abandoned the reins to the steady hands so used to hold them, and seated himself down to the consumption of innumerable clay pipes and glasses of bitter ale with Gus, who, being one of the most ancient of the order of the Cherokees, was an especial favourite with him.
On this third morning, however, there is a decided tone of weariness pervading the minds of both Gus and the Smasher. Three-handed all-fours, though a delicious and exciting game, will pall upon the inconstant mind, especially when your third player is perpetually summoned from the table to take part in a mysterious dialogue with a person or persons unknown, the result of which he declines to communicate to you. The view from the bow-window of the blue parlour in the White Lion, Liverpool, is no doubt as animated as it is beautiful; but Rasselas,‡ we know, got tired of some very pretty scenery, and there have been readers so inconstant as to grow weary of Dr. Johnson’s book, and to go down peacefully to their graves unacquainted with the climax thereof. So it is scarcely perhaps to be wondered that the volatile Augustus thirsted for the waterworks of Blackfriars; while the Smasher, feeling himself to be blushing unseen, and wasting his stamina, if not his sweetness, on the desert air, pined for the familiar shades of Bow Street and Vinegar Yard, and the home-sounds of the rumbling and jingling of the wagons, and the unpolite language of the drivers thereof, on market mornings in the adjacent market. Pleasures and palaces are all very well in their way, as the song says; but there is just one little spot on earth which, whether it be a garret in Petticoat Lane or a mansion in Belgrave Square, is apt to be dearer to us than the best of them; and the Smasher languishes for the friendly touch of the ebony handles of the porter-engine, and the scent of the Welsh rarebits§ of his youth. Perhaps I express myself in a more romantic manner on this subject, however, than I should do, for the remark of the Left-handed one, as he pours himself out a cup of tea from the top of the tea-pot—he despises the spout of that vessel as a modern innovation on ancient simplicity—is as simple as it is energetic. He merely observes that he is “jolly sick of this lot,”— this lot meaning Liverpool, the Count de Marolles, the White Lion, three-handed all-fours, and the detective police-force.
“There was nobody ill in Friar Street when I left,” said Gus mournfully; “but there had been a run upon Pimperneckel’s Universal Regenerator Pills: and if that don’t make business a little brisker, nothing will.”
“It’s my opinion,” observed the Smasher doggedly, “that this ’ere forrin cove has give us the slip out and out; and the sooner we gets back to London the better. I never was much of a hand at chasing wild geese, and”—he added, with rather a spiteful glance at the mild countenance of the detective—“I don’t see neither that standin’ and makin’ signs to parties unbeknown at street-comers and stair-heads is the quickest way to catch them sort of birds; leastways it’s not the opinion held by the gents belongin’ to the Ring as I’ve had the honour to make acquaintance with.”
“Suppose,” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers.¶
“Oh!” muttered the Smasher, “blow them fingers of his. I can’t understand ’em—there!” The left-handed Hercules knew that this was to attack the detective on his tenderest point. “Blest if I ever knows his p’s from his v’s, or his w’s from his e’s, let alone his vowels, and them would puzzle a conjuror.”
Mr. Peters glanced at the prize-fighter more in sorrow than in anger, and taking out a greasy little pocket-book, and a greasier little pencil, considerably the worse for having been vehemently chewed in moments of preoccupation, he wrote upon a leaf of it thus—“Suppose we catch him to-day?”
“Ah, very true,” said the Smasher sulkily, after he had examin
ed the document in two or three different lights before he came upon its full bearings; “very true, indeed, suppose we do—and suppose we don’t, on the other hand; and I know which is the likeliest. Suppose, Mr. Peters, we give up lookin’ for a needle in a bundle of hay, which after a time gets tryin’ to a lively disposition, and go back to our businesses. If you had a girl as didn’t know British from best French a-servin’ of your customers,” he continued in an injured tone, “you’d be anxious to get home, and let your forrin counts go to the devil their own ways.”
“Then go,” Mr. Peters wrote, in large letters and no capitals.
“Oh, ah; yes, to be sure,” replied the Smasher, who, I regret to say, felt painfully, in his absence from domestic pleasures, the want of somebody to quarrel with; “No, I thank you! Go the very day as you’re going to catch him! Not if I’m in any manner aware of the circumstance. I’m obliged to you,” he added, with satirical emphasis.
“Come, I say, old boy,” interposed Gus, who had been quietly doing execution upon a plate of devilled kidneys during this little friendly altercation, “come, I say, no snarling, Smasher. Peters isn’t going to contest the belt with you, you know.”
“You needn’t be a-diggin’ at me because I ain’t champion,” said the ornament of the P.R.,# who was inclined to find a malicious meaning in every word uttered that morning; “you needn’t come any of your sneers because I ain’t got the belt any longer.”
The Smasher had been Champion of England in his youth, but had retired upon his laurels for many years, and only occasionally emerged from private life in a public-house to take a round or two with some old opponent.
“I tell you what it is, Smasher—it’s my opinion the air of Liverpool don’t suit your constitution,” said Gus. “We’ve promised to stand by Peters here, and to go by his word in everything, for the sake of the man we want to serve; and, however trying it may be to our patience doing nothing, which perhaps is about as much as we can do and make no mistakes, the first that gets tired and deserts the ship will be no friend to Richard Marwood.”
