Introduction

Name a crime or criminal in the London of the 1920s and 1930s. I certainly couldn’t, until I began writing about real crime in London a few years ago. Whereas, before then, even I could have named a Victorian killer (Jack the Ripper), an Edwardian one (Dr Crippen) or a post-war murderer (John Christie). For most people, crime in England in this period is dominated by the fictional whodunit. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories still appeared in The Strand in the 1920s, though the stories were all set before 1914, and new sleuths, such as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, all emerged in this era to do battle with fictional criminals, almost always taken from the middle and upper classes. Television and radio dramas and films have made these characters well known.

The real villains, their victims and their foul deeds have been largely overlooked, at least in the public mindset. Compendia of crime refer to some of these, such as the infamous case of Vera Page in 1931 and the Croydon poisonings of 1928–9, but most of these are now forgotten, and in any case, most have only been dealt with in a very cursory manner. The majority featured here have never been discussed in print since they were reported in the press. It is the aim of this book to bring them back to public view. This book deals with all the unsolved murders in London from the 1920s and 1930s. Among the crimes found here are a railway murder, the mystery of parts of a body found at Brentford and at Waterloo station, prostitute murders in Soho, the fatal shooting of a policeman, a brutal child murder and two IRA killings. It does not include the Croydon poisonings (1928–9), the murder of Louisa Steele (1931) or Robert Venner (1934), for though these are usually stated as being unsolved, the author’s examination of police files has revealed that the police were well aware of who was responsible, but they lacked the evidence to bring the cases to trial. These two latter killings are detailed in the author’s Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Lewisham and Deptford, and the police file on the Croydon case provides a convincing case against the killer who also escaped justice.