City of Devils: A Novel (52 page)

James turned to leave.

‘Before you go, Murray, there is something I should say to you,’ Lombroso said very seriously.

‘What’s that?’

‘We must all be vigilant. Horton is still at large and we know him better than most. He is an habitual killer and his appetites will not be sated by his actions here for very long. If any of us see or hear anything that may indicate his where-abouts then we should meet at that place and ensure that he is apprehended once and for all. Are we agreed?’

The three men shook hands solemnly at this and James finally made his departure.

A few days later James was walking down the Via Legnano for the last time. Before long he would be back in Edinburgh with Lucy, telling her of his adventures. He had missed her terribly and it would be wonderful to see her again, despite the circumstances that had forced him to return to her. But their reunion came at a cost. He had to leave behind the woman he loved.

James felt a familiar jolt of pain in his heart as he thought of Sofia and the distance that would lie between them. But he had a duty as a brother, and indeed as a son, and that had to come first. There was no way to resolve his dilemma but perhaps one day there would be. That little nugget of hope would have to keep him going in the months to come.

He took a detour and made his way towards the museum. As he did so, it seemed to him that the atmosphere had changed. With the death of one killer and the departure of another it was as though a pall had lifted. Even the air smelled sweeter and he felt as if he could finally breathe deeply again. The place was not completely devoid of its shadows. There were plenty left there, hoping to re-emerge as time went on, as there are in any city. But for now they had withdrawn into the darkness. And if they stayed there, even for a while, then that really would be a more than fitting tribute to Lombroso.

Author’s Notes

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909)
is known as the father of modern criminology. His theory of the born criminal dominated thinking about criminal behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Essentially he believed that criminality was inherited and that criminals could be identified by physical defects that confirmed them as being atavistic or savage throwbacks to early man.

Lombroso studied medicine at the Universities of Padua, Vienna and Pavia, and shortly after graduating he volunteered as an army doctor and was stationed in Calabria. It wasn’t until the 1870s that he began to focus on the study of criminals.

In 1871, on examining the skull of one Giuseppe Vilella, an elderly Calabrian peasant who had been imprisoned for theft and arson, Lombroso wrote:

At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheekbones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extreme acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.

From the Introduction to
L’uomo delinquente,
Cesare Lombroso, 1909 edition, xxiv-xxv

This, he claimed, was a turning point for him and inspired his life’s work in criminology. He was appointed as a Professor of Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene at the University of Turin in 1876. Over the years he became one of the most well-known and prominent thinkers in Italy, writing prodigiously and performing many experiments using some of the equipment described in
City of Devils.

He was endlessly curious about crime, criminals and their motivation for offending, as well as their culture, and this led to two things. Firstly, Lombroso collected artefacts created by and belonging to prisoners he had encountered in his long career as well some more bizarre exhibits, such as carnivorous plants and a mummy, as described in the book. These he housed at the University of Turin, informally at first and then later in 1892 as a museum open to the public. This closed in 1914 but has recently reopened. One of its most prominent exhibits is the head of Lombroso himself in a jar of preservative, a legacy he kindly donated on his death in 1909.

So what kind of a man was Cesare Lombroso? Reading between the lines of his work he seems to me to be a basically kind, occasionally capricious and always ebullient man who believed in the essential rightness of what he was doing. He was a national celebrity during his lifetime and as a result his lectures often played to packed houses. His opinion was sought on all kinds of subjects, probably because he was not afraid to court controversy. He had a theatrical turn of phrase and was, perhaps, something of a showman. If he was alive today, doubtless he would be an avid user of Twitter, a frequent blogger and perhaps even have his own television show.

Notwithstanding his celebrity status, as a scientist he was disorganised and even chaotic and had a tendency to buttress his less successful results with the use of anecdotes, proverbs and literary passages. He was also not above bending his findings to fit his theories when occasion demanded. This was food for his many academic critics but also made his work more accessible and therefore even more popular with the public.

Until relatively recently his reputation as a criminologist was somewhat tarnished, not only by his rather slapdash approach to the collation of data but also by his attitudes to women and certain racial groups. In addition, much of his work was never adequately translated into English. Perhaps as a result of these things, both the man and his work were at best misunderstood and at worse largely forgotten. However, with the translation in the last few years of his two major works,
Criminal Man
and
Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman
(Rafter and Gibson 2004/6), and the reopening in 2009 of his famous museum in Turin, this is beginning to change.

I would argue that he should be judged as a man of his time. Although one might not agree with his conclusions and views on various matters, they did, to some extent, reflect nineteenth-century attitudes. For all his flaws as a scientist and researcher, it is clear that Cesare Lombroso made a huge contribution to the understanding of crime and criminals and inspired many others to examine the topic of crime from a scientific perspective.

An enthusiast, a collector and an innovator, Lombroso achieved much in his life worth talking about, not least the invention of a prototype for the lie detector. But if I had to sum him up in a phrase I would turn to his recent translators who described his work in their introduction. It was, they said, ‘a magnificent tangle of brilliance and nonsense,’ (Rafter and Gibson 2004 p 31) just like the man himself. I found him as a character to be both infuriating and endearing in equal measure. Whatever you may think of his eccentricities, he was never anything less than fascinating.

Salvatore Ottolenghi (1861–1934)
was Lombroso’s assistant from 1885 to 1893 and went on to found the first School for Scientific Policing in Rome in 1903.