CRIME HAS ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR. In George Orwell’s essay Decline of the English Murder (1946) he pictures a chap on a Sunday afternoon. ‘The wife is already asleep in the armchair… You put your feet up on the sofa and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire… have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the fire is well alight… In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?’
‘Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder?’ He answers the question – the murders ‘which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public’ have ‘a fairly strong family resemblance’ running through them. He then lists notorious murderers from ‘our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period… Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong’ (he excludes Jack the Ripper who ‘is in a class by himself’). They have a link. ‘The background of these crimes was essentially domestic; the victims… were either wife or husband of the murderer.’ In this golden age poison was often the ‘weapon’ of choice, and ‘sex was a powerful motive’, as was the desire for respectability. ‘Murder… was less disgraceful than being detected in adultery.’ Orwell then addresses the usual moan that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays’. The murders of old were couth. ‘From a News of the World reader’s point of view,’ writes Orwell, the ‘perfect’ murder is set in a semi in the suburbs, the murderer is
‘a dentist or solicitor…’ It is the world of Miss Marple. Parochial, almost genteel. Herbert Armstrong, the only solicitor ever hanged for murder, said ‘scuse fingers’ while offering a poisoned scone to his victim.
Orwell’s essay is amusing nonsense. Murder, crime, has never been fluffy. Raffles, the gentleman crook, exists only in fiction. Crime wasn’t more fun for the victim in days of yore; murder is murder. Brutes like Baby Face Nelson (movie poster, over, 1957) had cute names, but weren’t. Ned Kelly, the Aussie bandit, had a cute name for his sawn-off rifle… ‘Betty’. Bonnie and Clyde (with 13 victims) were only glamourous in retrospect because their tommy guns and cars were photogenic. They used Fords to escape. Mr. Barrow wrote to Henry Ford – ‘What a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusivly when I could get away with one.’
But the age was more innocent. More gullible. Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower twice. To find one mug was lucky, to scam TWO almost genius. The fascination with crooks and crime goes back centuries, hangings were gala events. Dylan’s line from Desolation Row is true: ‘They’re selling postcards of the hanging…’ Ditties were penned, like this one about a nice Massachusetts spinster who walloped her parents (but was acquitted): ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.’ But serial killers like Jack the Ripper at least felt a bit sheepish. He skulked around Whitechapel in the fog, and disappeared. Unlike the Muswell Hill murderer 100 years later. Donald Nilson cut up his victims and flushed them down the toilet; then moaned to the landlord about blocked drains!
