The Invention of Murder (42 page)

The plot of
The Woman in White
is complex, and appears even more so because of the overlapping narratives. Late one night near Hampstead Heath, Walter Hartright, a poor artist, meets a mysterious woman dressed in white, and helps her to escape from her unidentified pursuers. He takes up a position teaching drawing to two half-sisters in Cumberland, Laura Fairlie, an heiress with whom he falls in love, and Marian Halcombe, masculine (she has a moustache) and intelligent. Laura loves Walter, but is engaged to Sir Percival Glyde (obviously a villain, from his penny-blood name, and also from the fact that
All the Year Round,
in which this was serialized, placed another article by Collins, on Vidocq, close by). Soon after their marriage Laura discovers that Glyde is heavily in debt. We now discover that the mysterious woman in white was Anne Catherick, Laura’s unknown half-sister, who has been incarcerated in an asylum by Sir Percival to prevent her revealing his closely guarded secret. To get access to Laura’s fortune, Count Fosco, Sir Percival’s friend and co-villain, plans to have Laura incarcerated under Anne’s name, while Anne, who has a weak heart, will conveniently be allowed to die and be buried as Laura. Marian discovers their plot, and with Walter panting in her wake (he, as the man, is the nominal prime mover, but he is a pale shadow compared to the heroic Marian) sets out to rescue Laura.
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Laura is freed, but is still legally dead, so Walter seeks out Sir Percival’s secret, which is that he is illegitimate, and therefore not ‘Sir’ Percival at all. Sir Percival is burnt to death while attempting to destroy the parish register that would expose him, Fosco is forced into a confession that permits Laura to recover her fortune, and is then assassinated in a timely fashion by a member of the Carbonari, the Italian secret society he had betrayed decades before, who just happens to have discovered him at this opportune moment.

The plot of
The Woman in White
is no more plausible than those of many penny-bloods or gothic romances. Laura, an educated upper-class woman, is presented in the asylum as a village girl with no education; she could speak French, play the piano, paint – it was not possible that they could be confused. Likewise, although she is a typically mid-Victorian weedy heroine, frequently ailing, she is carefully tended by those who wish her ill before being imprisoned in an asylum. Why isn’t she simply allowed to die? The question of why this book found lasting success while books with equally implausible plots were forgotten has two answers. One is that the gaps in the plot are more than covered over by Collins’ superb narrative drive. More important than that is the character of Count Fosco. The villain of the piece should have been the evil Sir Percival, but he is of the melodrama school – he is a villain because he is bad, and bad because he is a villain. Fosco, a fat, amiable, chuckling monster, represents a new, more psychologically reflective type of villainy, one in which a superficially respectable – a likeable – man, a man you would invite into your home, turns out to have a completely separate, secret personality. He bursts on the world as a new type of fictional malefactor: the man who smiles, and smiles, and is a villain.

Fosco is the source of the new archetype of the master-criminal, an archetype which would lead to Sherlock Holmes’s rival Moriarty, and even James Bond’s Blofeld. The master-criminal was now a gentleman; he was not only educated, he was cleverer than anyone around him. Fosco was medically trained, had knowledge of secret poisons, and esoteric skills in sudden death. But in his public persona, every bit as important as his secret criminal life, he was a connoisseur of art and music (like Madeleine Smith, he attends a performance of
Lucrezia Borgia),
a man of charisma and charm. Collins may have plotted himself into a corner towards the end of the book – Fosco’s plan is so elaborately successful that Collins has to make him confess. In terms of plotting, the situation is awkward, but Fosco, no less than Falstaff, is one of those characters whose life force enables him to break free of the book that holds him. His malevolent glee at his own cleverness, his posturing, preening, glorious – and gloriously comic – egotism are what matter.

Other sensation-novels using similar source material were more conventional, relying on older fashions. The Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Uncle Silas
(1864) had an isolated house, home to Uncle Silas himself, a traditionally sinister villain who regularly falls into drug-induced trances, and who is guardian to the innocent heiress Maud. The backstory, however, was a reprise of Palmer’s murder of Cook. Silas, when young, was a reckless gambler who entertained Mr Charke, ‘a gentleman of the turf’ who had won large sums from Silas, only to be found with his throat slit in a room locked from the inside, while his ‘memorandum book in which his bets were noted’ and much of his money were missing. Disconcertingly to the historian looking for archaeological traces of murder in fiction, some of the elements that seem to have been so obviously drawn from the Palmer case had in reality been created independently by Le Fanu. In 1838 Le Fanu had published ‘The Murdered Cousin’, the story of a gambler murdered in a locked room, whose ‘double-clasped pocket-book’ listing his host’s debts vanished after his death. (This locked-room puzzle story appeared three years before Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, supposedly the ‘first’ locked-room story.)
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In
Uncle Silas,
twenty-five years later, these fictional details were adjusted to fit more closely to the subsequent facts of Palmer’s crime, while the locked-room element was subordinated: in a stage adaptation of
Uncle Silas
at the end of the century, Le Fanu’s cunning solution to the locked room – a revolving window frame – is present, but Charke is murdered in the room next door, entirely missing the point.

Gradually, however, it was the detective element that prevailed, while the true-crime element faded into the background. Soon people were less interested in what crimes were committed than in how they were solved, copying, in fictional form, the earlier movement of policing from prevention to detection. To satisfy this desire for ‘how’, stories with detective heroes began to appear. Originally, many presented themselves as memoirs; a few were, but more were fictional constructs. In keeping with the general interest in police work, and with the expansion of magazines and newspapers that carried fictional tales of murder right next to crime reports, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ appeared in 1841. It is often put forward as the first detective story, and has many of the elements we now expect of the genre. Dupin is the prototypical amateur sleuthf
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with razor-like deductive abilities who outpaces the slow-thinking police, and whose obscure technical knowledge leads him infallibly to the truth. (For example, he recognizes that a piece of ribbon left at the crime scene is tied with a knot ‘which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese’.) Other elements of the story site it more firmly in the early nineteenth century, such as the penny-blood gothic window-dressing peeping out of Poe’s description of the narrator’s house, ‘a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long decayed’. The ‘Recollections of a Police Officer’ by the pseudonymous ‘Thomas Waters’ had appeared in
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
from 1849, the same year in which Dickens depicted Inspector Bucket in
Bleak House
and Collins published ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’, another early locked-room puzzle, in which a gambler wins big and is persuaded to sleep the night in the gambling den, whereupon the canopy over his bed mechanically descends, threatening to squash him so that his winnings can be reappropriated by the house.
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The story, however, is narrated by the gambler, so the reader sees what is happening as he does, rather than having the solution presented at the end: there is no detective, and no puzzle.

Sensation-fiction implied a world in which every respectable person had a potentially unrespectable secret life, while crime fiction reassured the reader that only one person did, and that she or he would be separated from the respectable at the end. Sensation-fiction was about mystery; crime-writing was about certainty. Increasing urbanization had created a world where large numbers of strangers lived side by side in ignorance of others’ real natures: sensation-fiction, with its aura of menacing domesticity, might be seen as a response to this.
Bleak House
contained a policeman and a ‘solution’, but it was also full of people silently watching, attempting to read the truth behind their neighbours’ façades: characters have ‘a silent way of noticing’, they ‘never tired of watching’, are full of ‘private researches … watchings … listenings’.
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Tulkinghorn the lawyer sets the plot in motion with his determination to uncover Lady Dedlock’s secret. He is the old-fashioned type of detective, the thief-taker – he is in it for personal gain – while Bucket is the new, professional kind. But while the new type is depicted, the novel adheres to the older forms.

Sensation-fiction also implied that anyone could be a detective. The lawyer in
The Woman in White
sends a servant to track down a missing woman, while in Le Fanu’s
A Lost Name,
a vicar is requested to ‘examine’ a crime scene. More commonly, it was assumed that the appropriate person to take on the detective role was a concerned family member. This was standard in melodrama: Pharos Lee, the Bow Street Runner in the Maria Marten plays, is driven by family loyalty, not by professional duty: ‘On my father’s grave I took the oath of vengeance to hunt you down,’ he tells Corder. ‘I joined the law to complete my task.’ Later, Robert Audley unmasks Lady Audley in order to protect his uncle, as well as to locate his missing friend. In life rather than fiction, James Fitzjames Stephen, in an essay on ‘Detectives in Fiction and Real Life’, rejected the reality of the working-class detective, and said that Palmer’s crime had been uncovered owing entirely to Cook’s father’s suspicions.

One of the most commercially successful amateurs appeared in 1861, with Mrs Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret.
This was sensation-fiction in full, rip-roaring glory, with a melodrama plot, sensation-scenes, penny-dreadful scenarios, all neatly tucked under a tidy domestic surface. As Mrs Braddon herself said, ‘the amount of crime, treachery, murder and slow poisoning, & general infamy required [by her readers] … is something terrible’. Terrible, but, apart from slow poisoning, all appear in
Lady Audley’s Secret.
George Talboys, having made his fortune in Australia, returns to England to discover that Helen, the wife he left behind, has died. To distract him, his oldest friend, Robert Audley, takes him down to visit his uncle, Sir Michael Audley, newly married to Lucy Graham, a much younger, poor but beautiful governess. At Audley Court, the new Lady Audley unaccountably avoids her guests, and George mysteriously vanishes. Robert, against his will, is forced to investigate his friend’s disappearance, amid his growing suspicion of his uncle’s wife. He discovers that she is in fact Helen Talboys, George’s supposedly dead wife; to keep her secret she burns down the inn where he is sleeping. This fails to kill him, and she admits that she was George Talboys’ wife, but pleads in mitigation that he went off to Australia, leaving her with a small child and no means of support. This cuts no ice: Sir Michael, understandably upset to discover that he has married bigamously, abandons her, and Robert has Lady Audley declared insane after she admits that she pushed George down a well when he confronted her. Only now is it revealed, in a deathbed confession by the innkeeper, that George was rescued, and is alive. He returns, and after some neat tidying up of the romantic subplots everyone (except Lady Audley) ends happily ever after.

In this sensation-novel Robert is forced to turn detective, in the way Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe were in
The Woman in White,
not for the love of the chase, or for abstract notions of justice, but as a consequence of friendship. Dickens, in the same year as
The Woman in White,
drew a similar portrait, with the detective in ‘Hunted Down’ remorselessly tracking Slinkton for love of the murdered woman. It is fortunate, but not essential, that he is ‘an observer of men’ who finds himself noticing each ‘little key [that] will open a very heavy door’. He is drawn into detection by emotion, but solves the crime by observation. Observing was an equal-opportunities occupation in fiction. It may be because so many plots revolved around righting a family wrong that there was a plethora of fictional women detectives. In sensation-fiction there were countless of these avenging fiancées, wives and daughters: Valeria Woodville in
The Law and the Lady
finds the real murderer of her husband’s first wife; Marian Halcombe in
The Woman in White
searches for her sister; Anne Rodway in ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’ discovers her fellow lodger’s killer; Magdalen Vanstone in
No Name
fights for herself and her sister after her parents’ death – and those are only Wilkie Collins’ women.

A bridge from these family-burdened women to professional women doing a job is Mrs Bucket, who helps her husband in
Bleak House
by keeping watch on Hortense, the Maria Manning surrogate, ‘night and day’. She is ‘a lady of natural detective genius’, declares her proud husband. A decade later, the professional female detective was born. She was a sharp contrast to the reality of policing, which was entirely male until two women were hired to look after female prisoners at police stations in 1883. The legal system was even more testosterone-only: not only were judges and lawyers all men, so were juries until 1919. Yet in the early 1860s the female detective arrived on the page full-blown. In Edward Ellis’s
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penny-dreadful
Ruth the Betrayer
(published in fifty-two numbers, 1862–63), Ruth Trail is ‘a female detective – a sort of spy we use in the hanky-panky way when a man would be too clumsy’. She is not of the regular police, but ‘attached to a notorious Secret Intelligence Office, established by an ex-member of the police force’. (Rather wonderfully, it is so secret that the office has a brass plaque on the door: ‘Secret Agent’, it reads.) Similarly, in
Armadale,
the private inquiry office in Shadyside Place has ‘women attached’, who easily disguise themselves as servants, or milliners, to go into places male detectives might not be able to.