2009 non-fiction. Oates recounts the twenty cases in London during
these two decades which were treated as murder, but never solved.
That introduces a very strong selection bias, since the
Metropolitan Police of the era got convictions in about 95% of murder
investigations (the safety of those convictions by modern standards
would be another matter). There were probably also quite a few
incidents of dead bodies found in dodgy areas and never formally
investigated, being regarded as the result of criminals preying on
each other and thus saving everyone else the trouble of dealing with
them. (Whether any enterprising criminal chose to dump his respectable
victim in such a place, we shall never know.)
But within the selected cases, certain themes recur. There are two
basic classes: those with obvious suspects, and those with none. The
death of Kusel Behr, an egg merchant of Lithuanian origins, is clearly
in the former class, and is the closest these cases come to the
classical murder mystery: he died after taking strychnine in his tea,
and the only people who could have put it there were Behr himself, his
wife, and the parlourmaid. In spite of that apparent simplicity,
though, there was no further evidence, and no formal accusation was
ever made.
The no-obvious-suspects cases are typified by Edward Austin Creed, a
shopkeeper found on his premises killed by a blunt instrument, with
money missing. There's no reason to posit any explanation more complex
than a robbery with violence, but without advanced forensics and a
general list of people with their identifying characteristics there
was no way of tracking down the perpetrators.
What almost all these cases brought on that mystery stories rarely do
is false confessions, not just from those who fabulated in order to
get attention, but from people who wanted to get others into trouble:
abandoned girlfriends, former criminal partners, even unpaid
landladies. It's not surprising that the police became reluctant to
take such accusations seriously unless they were backed up by some
sort of corroborative detail.
On the other hand, having a sliding scale of penalties clearly had its
effect. A number of suspects produced as alibi a confession to a
lesser crime, as for example:
One Edward Hooper, a Scot and an army deserter, had a track record
of breaking into houses for shelter. However, it could be shown that
he had an alibi for the time of the assault on Priddle. He was
illegally entering St Luke's Vicarage in Hammersmith.
I've never been much of a true-crime fan; it feels like intruding into
private grief. Oates has clearly found a profitable niche in
summarising police reports and other contemporary material, with a
bibliography full of titles like Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in
Lewisham & Deptford, Foul Deeds in Richmond and Kingston, Foul
Deeds and Suspicious Deaths Around Uxbridge… well, you get the idea.
Still, he does quote his sources.
The individual accounts are pretty haphazard, reading like the sort of
draft one saw in the days before the word processor: subjects are
arbitrarily arranged, I suspect based largely on which source document
they were found in, and the narrative leaps from one to another. While
there are some useful period photographs, there are far more modern
ones, which is hardly helpful in giving an impression of what an area
might have been like when the events occurred.
I read this as research for
a new role-playing campaign,
and it did its job: there's good material here on police procedure and
the tracks their investigations tended to run in, as well as the sort
of people who became victims of unsolved crime – and other details,
like where the grotty neighbourhoods were in this era. I'd really like
more of this and less of the specific cases, but the book was still a
good starting point.
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