The Invention of Murder (43 page)

Ruth
precedes what are frequently called the first fictional female detectives. It is believed that the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester published his
Revelations of a Female Detective
sometime in 1864. Forrester’s lady detective, referred to as ‘G’ by her colleagues in what appears to be a private inquiry office, hires herself out, usually disguised as a dressmaker or milliner. She is coy about who or what led her into this profession: ‘It may be that I took to the trade … because I had no other means of making a living; or it may be that the work [sic] of detection I had a longing which I could not overcome. It may be that I am a widow working for my children – or I may be an unmarried woman, whose only care is herself.’ These stories appeared almost simultaneously with the anonymous
The Experiences of a Lady Detective
(the author is thought to have been the journalist William Stephen Hayward). Here the lady detective is Mrs Paschal, who is widowed, and forced to work at this unwomanly task from economic necessity. The reader is clearly supposed to understand that she works for Scotland Yard – her superior is a colonel, as was Scotland Yard’s real Commissioner, Charles Rowan. Mrs Paschal is a curious mix. Her superior approves of her because she shows ‘prompt and passive obedience’, but the front cover has a woman raising her skirt to show her ankle, while holding a cigarette (unimaginably modern twenty years before one book still thought it necessary to explain that cigarettes were ‘paper cigars’).

This ambivalence was not for women detectives alone. The police, as we have seen, were both admired and distrusted. Early-nineteenth-century fiction, together with its eighteenth-century forefathers, had understood the law to encompass punishment, not detection, and its professionalism had a negative connotation: money corrupted justice. In Godwin’s
Caleb Williams
the detective’s motive is, according to de Quincey in 1845, ‘vile eavesdropping inquisitiveness’. G.W.M. Reynolds, in
The Mysteries of London,
put it more simply for his working-class readers: a policeman ‘doubtless had several golden reasons for not noticing anything’ in a rich man’s house, while he ‘instantly ran. after a small boy who he suspected to be a thief, because the poor wretch wore an uncommonly shabby hat’. In
Martin Chuzzlewit,
likewise, Chevy Slyme joins the police on purpose to be ‘bought off’.

While Inspector Bucket in 1852 had done much to dispel this attitude, it was an earlier series of stories, begun in 1849, that was the first native-born foray into detective fiction for the sake of detection. These pseudonymous
Recollections of a Police Officer
appeared in
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
over four years, and were presented as the memoirs of a real policeman. However, ‘Charles Martel’s’
The Detective’s Notebook,
similarly presented as a memoir in 1860, is a mix: some of the episodes are old-fashioned chase stories, but others start to develop the idea of detection as a skill.

The main way of telling fictional memoirs from real ones is to look at the crimes. A real detective, James McLevy, who joined the force in Scotland in 1833, claimed to have worked on more than 2,220 cases by the time he produced two volumes of reminiscences,
Curiosities of Crime
and
The Sliding Scale of Life,
both in 1861. The cases he described included the theft of hens and tobacco, a mugging, a pick-pocketing. All except two, one a concealment of birth, the other a murder, were property crimes, and the sentences ranged between sixty days (for the theft of some ducks), nine months (the concealment of birth) and fourteen years’ transportation (the murder, reduced to culpable homicide). The volumes were reprinted a few times, but had no great success. How different were the stories of James McGovan, whose
Brought to Bay
was published in 1878 and sold 25,000 copies.
*
McGovan claims that McLevy was his ‘old friend’, and presents his work as reminiscences too, but here the stolen ducks are superseded by vast jewel thefts, a murder disguised as suicide, a counterfeiting ring run from ‘Fegan’s’. These are romances, tales of plucky young lads, broken-hearted mothers, noble sisters. Here there is no place for a crime such as McLevy reported, a man who stole 4½d. from an old woman – every penny she had in the world. McLevy’s world is the real world, a world where Helen Blackwood, a Glasgow prostitute, shared a room measuring eight feet by six feet inches with her lover, two other prostitutes who stayed there intermittently and two homeless boys, aged nine and eleven, whom she let sleep under her bed. This was reality.

For some time the working-class reading population remained ambivalent about detective fiction.
Ruth the Betrayer
was the heroine, but was ‘degraded by the hateful calling of spy and informer’. Forrester’s middle-class Miss G. fought back: ‘I am quite aware there is something peculiarly objectionable in the spy, but. we detectives are necessary,’ she states. And slowly the working class came to agree, at least some of the time. In
The Boy Detective
Ernest Keen is absolved of this horrible taint: ‘Our hero … could use dissimulation as a shield or sword when dealing with powerful enemies. In common life such conduct would be detestable, but Ernest Keen was the BOY DETECTIVE. in his own character there was not a franker, more impulsive lad in the world.’
The Boy Detective,
too, was one of the earliest penny-dreadfuls to teach readers how to detect vicariously: when Keen’s boss, Inspector Hawks, looks for clues he explains how one must not walk over ground where there might be footprints, how to match the suspect’s shoes against these prints, how to check for bloodstains and more.

The Boy Detective
was driven by the success of
Lady Audley’s Secret,
of which there were at least four London productions and one provincial one within twelve months of its first serialization. A West End production spoon-fed the audience explanations for all the novel’s mysteries by playing out each scene: Lady Audley’s backstory, and her connection to Helen Talboys, only slowly revealed in the book, were straightforwardly recited in the opening scene. The version at the Victoria entirely distrusted the audience’s ability to follow the plot, and spelled out the mystery elements – Lady Audley relates her entire history in soliloquy before pushing George down the well in view of the audience.

It was only in 1866, at Astley’s Amphitheatre, that the audience finally watched a detective detecting. This new focus was signalled by the title, which no longer concentrated on the villainess but, as
The Mysteries of Audley Court,
highlighted the puzzle element. Now Robert Audley instructs the audience about his job, which is to gather ‘a scrap, a shred, the fragment of a letter, an incautious word, a shadow … links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer’. This was only shortly after the
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
noted stories ‘called “detective” novels’, which place the reader ‘in the position of a Bow-street runner, panting and breathless to join in the “hue and cry”, and to run down imaginary crime’.
*
This was, significantly, not in an article entitled ‘Detective Literature’, but in one entitled ‘Sensation Literature’. For the moment, the two forms were not distinct.

The following year, Wilkie Collins turned once again to Madeleine Smith’s story, merging elements with that of Smethurst, in
Armadale,
his incredibly complicated and thus frequently overlooked novel. Two men, one rich, one poor, are both named Allan Armadale, the poor one travelling under the name Ozias Midwinter after running away from his unhappy, abused mother and cruel stepfather. He becomes friends with the rich Allan Armadale without knowing that the father of rich Allan Armadale was the murderer of his own father. Both Allans fall in love with the glamorous and obviously bad Lydia Gwilt (she, like Lady Audley, has red hair, now a villainess-indicator;
†
her surname, only one letter away from ‘guilt’, is a clue too). Lydia marries Midwinter: she knows he is really named Allan Armadale, and she plans to murder the rich Allan so that she, legally ‘Mrs Allan Armadale’, can claim his estate. She is foiled by Midwinter, and dies. (The book is actually much better than this summary makes it sound, once past the initial trauma of all the Allan Armadales.)

In Lydia Gwilt’s backstory, we are told that she poisoned her first husband, a gambler who beat her. Emile L’Angelier was similarly believed by many to have deserved his end, for his temerity in approaching a girl outside his class. In
Armadale
too the victim is perceived as the evil-doer: ‘I say he deserved it!’ Unlike Miss Smith, Miss Gwilt was found guilty, yet, as with both Miss Smith and Smethurst, she was ‘alive and hearty. free to. poison at her own entire convenience, any man, woman, or child that happens to stand in her way’. Collins makes this parallel plain in a long passage describing what happened after her trial:

Then, once Miss Gwilt was reprieved, ‘A general impression prevailed directly that she was not quite innocent enough, after all, to be let out of prison then and there! Punish her a little – that was the state of the popular feeling.’ And so she was re-tried, this time ‘for the robbery, after having been pardoned for the murder’.

Although the initiating moment of
Armadale,
a dream in which the action of the novel is foretold, closely resembles old-fashioned melodrama from Mrs Marten’s dream of the Red Barn onwards,
Armadale
more generally looked forward to the new detective genre. Like
Bleak House,
it is a novel where everyone spies and is spied on. There is James Bashwood, a professional private detective; Armadale hires someone to spy on Lydia; Lydia in turn spies on Armadale and his putative fiancée; a solicitor investigates Lydia’s friend Mrs Oldershaw.
*
With all of that, Collins shared the common view of professional detectives.
Armadale’s
detective operates out of an office on ‘Shadyside Place’, and in case that isn’t clear enough, he is described as a ‘vile creature … a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors’. Allan Armadale, headstrong and naíve, initially rejects all detective methods of investigating Lydia’s background, calling them ‘meddling in her private affairs’. His solicitor, less sympathetic but more pragmatic, calibrates levels of detection: ‘a man from Scotland Yard’ is less objectionable than a private detective.

This
de haut en bas
attitude was exacerbated by the fact that the police could be hired by any private individual. ‘At any moment you might, on the application of any individual in the country who chose to pay the costs, be sent to any part of the United Kingdom, or even out of it,’ wrote a Scotland Yard inspector in 1890. This private hiring (and therefore firing) of detectives survived even longer in fiction, consolidating the idea that detectives were like petty tradesmen, there when needed by the middle classes, dismissed when they were no longer wanted. In Mrs Gaskell’s
North and South
(1854–55) the police investigating a death are fired by the northern manufacturer to protect the heroine; they are fired again in Mrs Oliphant’s
Salem Chapel
(1862), by Dickens once more, in
Our Mutual Friend
(1865), and by Collins in
The Moonstone
(1868).

The Moonstone
was a halfway house for attitudes to police, and fictional detectives. The jewel of the title (really a huge diamond), stolen from a Hindu shrine during the Indian Mutiny, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder, from whose bedroom it is stolen. The suspects are Rachel herself, Rosanna Spearman, a maid with a dubious past, a group of Indian ‘jugglers’ who have been performing in the neighbourhood, and Franklin Blake, Rachel’s cousin. Sergeant Cuff suspects Rosanna, who commits suicide; after she is posthumously cleared his suspicion lights on Rachel, at which point Lady Verinder pays him off and sends him away. It takes the local scientific amateur to deduce that Franklin Blake stole the diamond in an opium-induced trance; he was seen by Rachel who, for love of him, has kept silent, leading to her suspicious behaviour. The diamond is re-stolen by Geoffrey Ablewhite, another suitor for Rachel’s hand, who turns out to be an embezzler and a pious fraud. Ultimately, the Indian jugglers, high-caste Brahmins in disguise, murder Ablewhite and steal the stone a third time, to return it to its rightful place in the shrine.

On his first appearance in the Verinder household, Sergeant Cuff adapts himself admirably to the people he interviews: with Mrs Yolland, a friend of the maid Rosanna, he discusses the royal family, Primitive Methodism, and the price of fish: ‘In about a quarter of an hour … good Mrs. Yolland was persuaded that she was talking to Rosanna’s best friend.’ But she is working-class. With the upper classes, things are not so easy. Cuff is outside his area of expertise, which is criminals, who by definition are of the ‘dangerous’, or working, classes (even though all the thieves in the novel turn out to be gentry). Thus he mistakes the evasions of Rachel Verinder, the daughter of the house, who is shielding the man she loves, for criminal knowledge. In spite of his professionalism, he still sees his function as that of a smoother-over of middle-class problems: ‘I had a family scandal to deal with,’ he says, ‘which it was my business to keep within the family limits.’ There is no difference between this professional man and the strictly amateur Mr Brownlow of
Oliver Twist
thirty years earlier. Sergeant Cuff would have arrested a guilty housemaid; a guilty daughter of a titled family would have had her crime kept ‘within the family limits’, at least as presented by a middle-class novelist for his middle-class audience.