The Invention of Murder (46 page)

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Lacenaire (1800-1836) was, like Wainewright, a writer, and his crimes too inspired many artists, from Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment to Marcel Carné, who in 1945 depicted him in the film Les Enfants du Paradis.

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The murderers here referred to are, in order, Franz Müller, Edward Pritchard, Constance Kent and Madeleine Smith; see below.

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Mayhew responded on the day Palmer was convicted, writing in the Illustrated Times that his letter of introduction had named the journal he was writing for, he had asked permission to publish, and he had shown Taylor a proof of the interview, which Taylor had corrected himself. Mayhew’s response appended a letter from another journalist, who confirmed that he had been present when Taylor had agreed to the publication of the interview.

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Palmer was routinely referred to as ‘the Rugeley Poisoner’, much to the town’s disgust. One story claimed that the locals petitioned the Prime Minister for permission to change their town’s name to escape the notoriety. ‘By all means, gentlemen,’ he genially responded, ’so long as you name your town after me.’ (The Prime Minister in question was Palmerston.)

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According to the governor of the gaol, on the way to the scaffold Palmer ‘minced along like a delicate schoolgirl, picking his way and avoiding the puddles … anxious not to get his feet wet’. This appears in the reminiscences of Henry Hawkins, a notoriously poor judge known to almost universal contempt as ‘Hanging Hawkins’. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography thinks his book is unreliable, and was almost certainly not written by him (the four chapters narrated by his dog were also, I suspect, not by the dog). The book was published in 1904. I wonder if George Orwell, born the previous year, ever read it. In his ‘A Hanging’, published in 1931, he described seeing an execution in Burma in 1926 where the condemned man, on his way to the scaffold, ’stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path’. Whether or not Orwell attended an execution is disputed – he claimed that he had, but he also said that it was ‘only a story’. Whatever the case, he had certainly read Thackeray’s ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’ – perhaps he had read Hawkins too.

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Another brother, George, complained to the press that his perfectly ordinary insurance transactions were reported in a libellous manner, insinuating that, as a Palmer, he must have ulterior motives. The Daily News agreed that it was disgraceful, and took the opportunity to repeat the allegations.

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The work is published under the pseudonym Ch. V. Cavour, but it appears to be by Xenos himself. Xenos was an active member of the London Greek community, writing a couple of historical novels and a book on the Great Exhibition, and in 1860 founding the British Star, a weekly paper in Greek.

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‘Reported to have been’ is the closest I can manage. Smethurst at his trials in 1859 was said to have been forty-eight years old, and to have married in 1828, which would have made him seventeen at the time. His wife, reported not terribly reliably to have been between seventy and seventy-three in 1859, was definitely substantially his senior, for her son by a previous marriage was four years older than Smethurst. But how Smethurst could have been a medical practitioner, even of the quackish type prevalent at watering places, and even with a medical degree that he probably purchased, before his marriage at seventeen, is a question to which I have found no solution. Perhaps the newspapers, which reported the age gap between himself and Mrs Smethurst as anything between eighteen and thirty years, were themselves confused, and he practised after, rather than before, his marriage.

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A contemporary writer on nineteenth-century medico-legal proof notes dryly that the expert Dr Taylor had been using copper gauze in his arsenic tests for fourteen years. In his testimony, Taylor acknowledged that he had been using this method ‘for many years’. Fortunately for him, if not for those other accused, both the judge and the defence failed to highlight this alarming fact.

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A modern commentator has suggested Crohn’s disease, the symptoms of which were not described until 1902, or categorized as a single illness until 1932.

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Smethurst had told the solicitor who drew up the will that they were not married, and his wife had signed it in her legal name. I am not sure that telling the truth is necessarily a definitive sign of bad character.

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Advertisements for arsenic-enhanced products continued to appear for the rest of the century. Dr. Mackenzie’s Arsenical Toilet Soap ‘with special ingredients’ was promoted as ‘a Beautifier of the Skin … guaranteed to contain Arsenic’ (see p.233). One of the celebrities recommending it in the accompanying copy was the actress Ellaline Terriss, whose own father was murdered, although not by arsenic (see pp.351-6).

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Others felt differently. Miss Smith’s two sisters remained unmarried, perhaps coinciden- tally. Miss Smith herself had a more adventurous life. At some point in the next few years she found work as an embroiderer with Morris & Co., William Morris’s design firm, and in 1861 she married George Wardle, Morris’s bookkeeper, draughtsman and ‘utility man generally’. In her late fifties – although claiming to be thirty-six – she moved to the USA; by her late seventies she was bigamously married to a builder thirty years her junior (and two years older than her son by Wardle).

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Or that is our judgement now. In 1862, Blackwood’s magazine classed Dickens’ Great Expectations as a sensation-novel, and as a less successful one than The Woman in White, at that.

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Marian’s primacy was recognized by many. Men were reported to have written in to the magazine offering themselves in marriage to the original, and Edward FitzGerald, adapter/ translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, named his boat the Marian Halcombe in her honour.

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It is useful to be reminded that pretty well all ‘firsts’ are nothing of the kind – Inspector Bucket as the ‘first’ detective was preceded by the stories of Thomas Waters; The Moonstone as the ‘first’ detective novel was preceded by Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent.

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The word sleuth, to mean detective, would not appear for another half-century. Originally short for sleuth-hound, or bloodhound, it only gained its secondary meaning in Britain early in the twentieth century.

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Conan Doyle might have known this story, or as a small boy he might have read The Poor Boys of London (see p.378), a penny-dreadful in which at one point the policeman is trapped by the villain in a room where the floor becomes red-hot and the ceiling comes down to crush him (our hero escapes). The premise is mirrored in Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’, in which an engineer is asked by counterfeiters to repair a faulty mechanism in their press. After he has done his work, they attempt to murder him in a room with a descending ceiling.

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In a series of so-called detective stories that appeared in Household Words, ‘detection’ is almost entirely equated with watchfulness. As late as 1897, in Dorcas Dene, Detective, when a private detective asks Dorcas to help him, she is initially repelled: ‘You want me to … watch people?’

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Edward Ellis was the pseudonym of Charles Henry Ross, possibly writing with Ernest Warren.

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While these stories were finding such success in Scotland, Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical student in Edinburgh.

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The Oxford English Dictionary, surprisingly, dates the first print usage for ‘detective novel’ to 1924.

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Although these red-headed women were regarded by the reading and theatre-going public as epitomes of evil, they were remarkably inefficiently evil. Lady Audley tries to kill George Talboys, Robert Audley and Luke Marks (the innkeeper), and fails each time. Lydia Gwilt tries three times to kill Allan Armadale, and doesn’t succeed either.

Miss Gwilt demonstrates one difference between sensation-fiction and melodrama. In melodrama, any character with a mysterious past turns out to be a baby switched at birth, or stolen by gypsies, or the daughter/sister/wife of one of the other central characters. Miss Gwilt, however, springs out of nowhere. In this novel of a family curse passed down through the generations she alone has no family, and her existence and place in the world is never explained – something that would have been unthinkable in the older style.

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Mrs Oldershaw is yet another real criminal fictionalized by Collins: she is a portrait of Madame Rachel, otherwise Rachel Leverson, the owner of a cosmetics shop in Bond Street. She was convicted of blackmail after Armadale was published, but even before it was generally suspected (and Collins was happy to reinforce the suspicion) that she was also an abortionist and procuress.

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The piece began with an unintentionally counterproductive typographical error, referring to ‘the Defective Police’.

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A further link to Palmer in Middlemarch can be found in the death of Raffles, the blackmailer, who is hurried to his death when his victim gives him alcohol, which has been strictly forbidden, just as the heavily insured Walter Palmer was said to have been plied with alcohol by his murderous brother. The same detail appears in Dickens’ ‘Hunted Down’ of the same year.

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I assume that the sexual innuendo was intentional, given Mrs Bartlett’s pregnancy following her one ‘episode’ with her husband.

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This may trump Paul Ferroll’s confession left in his wife’s grave for ‘least likely place to leave a confession’.