IN 1929, under the headline “Mr. Edgar Wallace on the Murder Men of Chicago,” the Daily Mail reported that Britain’s most prolific writer of thrillers had gone to the United States to gather material on the lives of gangsters. His apparent hope was that he could reinvigorate his fictions by larding them with references to ruthless “racketeers,” victims who were “taken for a ride,” or rivals who were “bumped off.”1 Wallace’s obvious goal was to exploit the growing British fascination with accounts of American crime. In the 1930s and ’40s English readers turned in increasing numbers to the sex and violence ridden American thrillers of James Cain and Mickey Spillane. Progressives such as Richard Hoggart and George Orwell considered this addiction to the hard-boiled school of American crime fiction a tragedy.2 Such intellectuals could not understand why so many workers found American works refreshingly realistic. They did not appreciate that class-conscious readers judged the classic British detective novel, complete with country estate, bumbling bobby, deferential servant, and bourgeois amateur sleuth, too transparently a defense of the social status quo. Working-class readers felt far more comfortable in the hardscrabble urban worlds of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Workers sensed that the “tough guy” novel in which the legitimacy of the authorities was often questioned, spoke to their concerns.3
It was also the case that until the 1940s moviegoers in search of gangster films necessarily went to American movies. The portrayal of gangland was essentially an American enterprise. Some put it down to cultural differences or taste. The United States had crime bosses, Britain had villains. What few people at the time noted was that the British film industry’s failure to portray criminal networks was not by chance, it was inevitable, given the British Board of Film Censors’ resolute opposition to domestic productions that could be interpreted as in any way glorifying crime. The board had the power to prevent the making of films that depicted minor police indiscretions or momentary criminal successes.4
These restrictions help explain why no one produced a film devoted to the Mayfair playboys, despite newspapers around the world giving them extensive coverage. Indeed the British popular press provided the masses with the true crime stories that the film industry failed to deliver. The Daily Mail and Daily Mirror devoted more column inches to trial reports than to any other topic, and they bulked even higher in the Sunday papers.5 In focusing on sensational crimes the popular papers of the 1930s were maintaining a century-old tradition, as were their critics, who at best regarded them as regurgitating escapist and distracting pap and at worst inspiring the impressionable to become copycat criminals.
The tabloids especially valued stories of the toff gone bad. Thanks to these popular papers it is possible to trace the careers of the Mayfair playboys from their trial backward in time to their childhood and schooling, their escapades and crimes, and forward to their convictions, punishments, and attempts at rehabilitation. The tabloids provided close-to-verbatim accounts of the leading trials and carried on the policy of publishing the “confessions” of the convicted. Their editors could in addition reprint easily accessible police depositions and witness statements. They customarily did not employ investigative journalists, even for the most sensational court cases.6 As one historian has noted: “Newspapers often presented such cases as exposing a dangerous underworld to the purifying light of the public gaze, but they rarely undertook that task themselves.”7 Part I of this study responds to this challenge. It provides an overview of the world that produced, sheltered, and ultimately punished the Mayfair playboys. The narrative lays out who these young men were, the harebrained scheme they concocted, and the price they paid.