Read The Invention of Murder Online
Authors: Judith Flanders
The real legacy of Jack the Ripper was as an archetype, and it seems only appropriate that this faceless, internationally renowned killer should have become enmeshed with one of the most recognizable detective archetypes of all time. With Sherlock Holmes, everything suddenly pulled together. Holmes is, as the amateurs of sensation-fiction had been, middle-class, and he detects not for money (even though he is frequently paid) but for an abstract sense of justice, or the love of knowledge: ‘I play the game for the game’s own sake.’ He earns his reputation not as a concerned relative, and not because of his social position, but because of his slowly and laboriously acquired knowledge, and his talents – the reader is given to understand that we could all become detectives if only we worked at it; a very democratizing idea.
Other stories missed this fine balance.
Reaping the Whirlwind,
a boys’ adventure story, has its detective help the rightful heir win back his landed estate; as a reward he is made its land agent, as though a gentlemanly life in the country were every man’s desire. In
Martin Hewitt, Investigator,
Hewitt is a young legal clerk who sets up on his own as a detective. But in one case, although he works out who committed a crime, he does nothing, because, ‘I’m not a policeman … Of course, if anybody comes to me to do it as a matter of business, I’ll take it up …’
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One set of stories is aimed too high, one too low, for the middle-class audience. While Holmes frequently allows criminals to escape, he does so to fit in with his notions of justice rather than law.
In the earliest detective stories James McLevy and his cohorts wrote about the slums; Andrew Forrester and his about ducal jewel thefts. Although the later Sherlock Holmes moves up in the world, in his early days he was situated between the two, like his readers. Many of the stories are set in suburbia, where his readers lived, and tap into everyday details that resonated with them. ‘It is my belief, Watson,’ says Holmes, ‘. that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’ Holmes could not have thought that in the days of
The Mysteries of London,
or even of
The Boy Detective
– and what is more, had he done so, the books would not have sold. But by the end of the century, in ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, the interpreter, after a nasty adventure, is dumped in a dark street, and is reassured when a stranger tells him, ‘If you walk on a mile or so, to Clapham Junction. you’ll just be in time for the last [train] to Victoria.’ It was the safety, the security of that suburban, domestic, middle-class world, with crime safely tucked away where decent people did not venture, that readers craved after the horrors of 1888.
For several years, every time a woman was knifed, the newspapers worried that another Ripper murder had occurred. Similar knife-murders in other parts of the world were also reported, with the suggestion that ‘Jack’ had fled to wherever that week’s crime had taken place. When Mrs Hogg was found dead in 1890,
Lloyd’s
meant to soothe fears: ‘When the murder at first was bruited abroad the alarming rumour spread that Jack the Ripper had been at work in the locality, and had cut off a woman’s head. The inquiries made by our representative, however, seem to show that this latest atrocity was not perpetrated in the manner associated with that individual’s operation’.
Some could not let the matter go. Two years after the murders, a newspaper vendor was prosecuted for false pretences after he shouted, ‘Another horrible murder and mutilation. Jack the Ripper at work again.’ (He received thirty-one days’ hard labour, ostensibly because he had a record, but surely at least in part because of the still-ready-to-be-ignited fears.) At the height of the murders, the police had received over a thousand letters a week. A year later, there were still enough arriving for Scotland Yard to use pre-printed forms to acknowledge receipt of these missives. Some of them were less repeats of the past than symbols of the future. One was said to have been marked with a bloody thumbprint.
The Times
reminded its readers that ‘The surface markings on no two thumbs are alike,’ and suggested that the many suspects should be summoned to have their thumbs compared with the print.
This was remarkably up-to-date. Fingerprinting had been pioneered in India, when Sir William Herschel, a magistrate in Bengal,had used a system of prints for legal documents. The scientist Francis Galton also worked on the subject, showing that fingerprints were unique to each individual, and did not alter over time. Herschel had promoted his system to a civil servant, Edward Henry, who developed a method of classification and identification that was simple to use and relatively reliable, taking in Galton’s classification, storage and retrieval systems. In 1901 Henry was appointed to the CID, and within months he had set up a central fingerprint office. By 1902 the first conviction on fingerprint evidence was secured: at the Old Bailey, Harry Jackson was found guilty of stealing billiard balls from a house which, unfortunately for him, had freshly painted windowsills. In 1903, even fiction had caught up: in ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard points out a mark on the wall to Sherlock Holmes: ‘You are aware that no two thumb-marks are alike,’ he says, showing him a ‘waxen print’ that he had taken from his suspect. Holmes, now sounding distinctly behind the times, murmurs only, ‘I have heard something of the kind.’
But before that, in 1898, another of those not-very-good, cashing-in novels appeared. Guy Boothby’s
The Lust of Hate
has a mysterious Dr Nikola who lives ‘in luxury’ in a disused warehouse decorated with ‘at least a dozen valuable pictures’, waited on by a deaf-mute Chinese servant. He kills his enemies by decoying them into a specially fitted-out hansom cab, whose cushions are filled with anaesthetic gas. Once the victim is unconscious, the seat revolves and the body drops out, to be found dead in the middle of a lonely road. The bodies are all similarly mutilated by the seat’s mechanism as they fall.
The novel on its own has nothing of interest, but with this confection we have come full circle, returning once more to a penny-dreadful, a revolving chair through which murder victims are dropped, Sweeney Todd style. It is appropriate that this taste of the Demon Barber appears in a novel based on Jack the Ripper, for in many ways the two men are mirror images. While Sweeney Todd never existed, and the 1888 Whitechapel serial killer definitely did, everything we know about Jack the Ripper – his name, his persona, his reasons for killing – is the culmination of a century of murderous entertainment,of melodrama, of puppet shows, of penny-dreadfuls and more. The excitements, the fears and the sense that murder was a spectacle were all focused by the killings, and projected onto the blank screen of unknowingness created by the lack of solution to the crime. The Whitechapel murderer operated for ten weeks; ‘Jack the Ripper’ was the product of the entire previous century. And this mythical figure, in turn, opened the door to a new century of killing, a vastly less entertaining, and more frightening, proposition.
Murder had developed, as de Quincey had prophesied. An apparatus had developed around murder, a scaffolding: there was a police force now; there were detectives. There were stage shows featuring detectives, there were waxworks, puppet shows, songs and sketches; there were, perhaps most importantly of all, detective stories and novels. Crime fiction took this new scaffolding, and covered it with an attractive surface. Now it had a shape, and a
raison d’être.
The detective stands with his back to the fire: ‘You may be wondering why I’ve summoned you all together,’ he pronounces. No one wondered any more. Detection – in fiction, at any rate – made the world safe. The sleuth-hound would track down the murderers and bring them to justice; no longer would people have to look over their shoulders in fear. The cunning of the criminal was matched on stage, on the page, by the wisdom of the hunter.
Repeated over and over, this archetype became, in people’s minds, reality. Most people in Britain had never had to worry about murder: by the nineteenth century it was vanishingly rare; by the start of the new century, therefore, a love of blood could be indulged in safely and securely, without any fear of an ugly reality bursting in. Instead, oceans of blood could cheerfully be poured across the stage, across the page, in song and sermon. Murder was, finally, a fine art.
*
Mr Justice Stephen would continue on his merry way. Two years later he told the jurors at the trial of Florence Maybrick that they were not there to decide whether or not James Maybrick had been poisoned, but rather to judge the case of an adulterous woman who ‘had already inflicted a dreadful injury [on her husband] – an injury fatal to married life’. Florence Maybrick was found guilty, but after an outcry her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she served fourteen years.
*
This was the notorious ‘Maiden Tribute of Babylon’ case, Stead’s journalistic crusade against child prostitution. To prove that children were easily bought and sold for sex, Stead himself ‘bought’ a thirteen-year-old girl. Although the uproar ultimately led to changes in the criminal law, Stead was prosecuted and, the child’s father not having given his permission for the ’sale’ of his daughter, found guilty on a technicality and sentenced to three months in gaol.
*
In fact Matthews might have been able to discover the truth more easily than either the judge or the anti-Semitic editor: an extraordinary linguist, he most unusually spoke Yiddish.
*
I can find no meaning in the Inspector’s unusual name, the slang word ‘wimp’ appearing to be a twentieth-century Americanism.
*
Time has only enlarged the number of possibilities. A twentieth-century crime historian has listed some of the ‘beguilingly diverse pretenders’: the Duke of Clarence; Montague John Druitt, a barrister; James Kennet Stephen, the son of the judge; a Jewish ritual circumciser; several doctors and a midwife; a magician; the Revd Samuel Barnett, the social reformer and founder of Toynbee Hall; the painter Walter Sickert; the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and the novelist George Gissing; Gladstone; Dr Barnardo; and ‘a perfectly blameless member of the late Bertrand Russell’s family’. Several murderers also made the list: Mrs Pearcey, George Chapman, Thomas Neill Cream and Frederick Deeming, ‘the Rainhill murderer’.
*
Perhaps things change less than one thinks. In August 2009 the BBC reported that a woman suffered a potential miscarriage by saying she had experienced ‘intimate bleeding’.
*
Sir John Tenniel (1820-1894) is best known to posterity as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872). To his contemporaries, however, it was his satirical political cartoons for Punch, where he had been chief cartoonist since 1865, that were his calling card.
†
This is probably not so. The public rewards that had been routine in the early part of the century had long been seen to encourage misreporting from those eager for the money, and had been virtually discontinued outside fiction.
*
Spring-Heel’d Jack was perhaps the first ever urban legend. In 1837 an extraordinary figure, with bat’s wings, goat’s horns, a tail and springs in his heels which enabled him to leap over high walls, was sighted across south London. In 1838 a woman in Bow reported that a man had asked for a candle, before ‘vomit[ing] blue and white flames’, his eyes ‘balls of white fire’ as he tore at her dress with his metal claws. Several further attacks appeared in the newspapers over the next two months, and intermittently up to the 1920s. A penny- blood of the adventures of Spring-Heel’d Jack appeared shortly after his first appearance in 1838; the first play, at a minor theatre, was in 1840, and others soon followed. In 1867, Spring-Heel’d Jack (now wearing a natty scarlet suit) became a forty-part serial. In the earlier penny-bloods he had been a predator, a despoiler of women; by the 1870s, he had become a Batman-like righter of wrongs.
*
‘Leather Apron’ was one of many suspects, a local man who wore a leather apron and was reported to have mistreated prostitutes. A bootmaker named Joseph Pizer was briefly arrested; he had indeed worn a leather apron, it being the uniform of his trade. The police were convinced of his non-involvement, and he was released without charge.
†
Most newspapers reprinted this letter, quite a few in facsimile. The
Morning Post
baulked at the word ‘whores’, however, and omitted it from its transcript.
*
Less glamorously, he ploddingly echoes police procedure with his elaborate filing system. This sounds like a character in A Terrible Temptation (1871) by Charles Reade, who said every piece of paper that crossed his desk ‘ought either to be burnt, or pasted into a classified guard-book, where it could be found by consulting the index … Underneath the table was a formidable array of note-books, standing upright, and labelled on their backs. There were about twenty large folios, of classified facts, ideas, and pictures … Then there was a collection of … smaller folio guard-books called Indexes … by way of climax, there was a fat folio ledger, entitled “Index ad Indices”,’ all of which is astonishingly similar to Holmes’s magisterial index books.
*
‘Ask for the Whitechapel crime … The horrible murder of two women by Jack the Ripper … Horrible details … One penny!’ Jack the Ripper appears to be the only nineteenth- century murderer to receive his own sobriquet in foreign languages: Jack l’Éventreur (‘éventrer’ is ‘to eviscerate’, or, more prosaically, ‘to gut’, as with fish), Johann der Ausschlitzer, Giovanni il Squartatore, Jack o Estripador, Jack el Destripador.
*
Sherlock Holmes evidently learned from Sir Charles Warren’s difficulties. Less than two years after the commissioner was chased across Hyde Park, Conan Doyle ensured that Holmes’s Toby, ‘half spaniel and half lurcher’, follows the scent of a murderer who has conveniently first stepped in creosote in a quiet suburb.
*
The publication can be dated solely from the cover illustration, which shows a dead woman lying below a poster that refers to four murders.
*
Sherlock Holmes reflected this aspect of the case too: in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, a spinster in Croydon receives two ears in the post, just as Mr Lusk had received the ‘kidne’. She suggests that they may have been sent by medical students for a joke, but Holmes knows better: ‘who but their murderer would have sent this sign of his work.?’
*
However, Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger, a fine Ripper novel of 1913 (outside the time-span of this book), meshes the two when the mysterious lodger/murderer confronts the landlady who has penetrated his disguise in the Chamber of Horrors.
*
It was, of course, only in retrospect that one could say when the series of murders ended. As late as 1890, any woman murdered by a knife, or a prostitute murdered by any method, was frequently introduced in the press as another Ripper killing.
*
Horses seemed to receive special licence for names or phrases that would be otherwise beyond the pale: in 1881, the racehorse Filho da Puta appeared in the lists, also without comment. It was not until the twentieth century that the registration of racehorses’ names became established, and those that were vulgar, offensive or had unpleasant links were banned. Today, says Weatherby’s, the central administrative offices of British horseracing, Jack the Ripper would not be permitted (much less Myra Hindley or Harold Shipman). In 1864, such censorship would have been considered an outrage: Bell’s ‘Rough Notes on Turf Nomenclature’ begins: ‘It is but natural and proper that every man should call his own horse by the name which seems best to himself.’
*
These two plays formed the basis of two further works of art, G.W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929), starring Louise Brooks, and Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (1937); but they fall outside the time-span of this book.
*
Martin Hewitt also investigates a case where a runner is prevented from entering a race to benefit some gamblers. One of the characters is called Steggles, and if the schoolboy P.G. Wodehouse did not read this story aged thirteen, before going on to write ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ (1922), in which a crooked bookie named Steggles rigs a bet, then I will eat my deerstalker.