Sparked by two of my collections of essays, Murder in High Places and Murder in Low Places, Jacques Barzun suggested that “every geographical level has been scanned by our tireless crime chronicler except perhaps the middle distance,” and went on to grumble: “It seems no longer possible to publish studies of crime without attaching them to some extraneous feature that provides a link.”
Apropos of the latter comment, I was, of course, surprised, also delighted, to be asked by the enterprising Kent State University Press to put together an assortment of essays, diverse apart from being about murder.
Jacques Barzun calls me a crime chronicler—and (I had forgotten) I notice that in one of the pieces I have included here, written a long, long time ago, I used the same term. Better—oh, so much better—than “criminologist,” which was the invariable job title when I turned to crime. I am advised to say that I am sure that criminologists are worthy people; but, even so, neither I nor any of the colleagues I respect has the least interest in, or slightest use for, their statistics, extrapolations, and psychiatric guesses. No; for many years now I have quietly campaigned (eventually, I believe, successfully) for acceptance of “crime historian”—“historian” being preferable to “chronicler” because a chronicle is a bare-bones retelling, without analysis or interpretation, and an account of a case should surely be subjective—should permit the expression of personal likes and dislikes, the inclusion of associated peculiarities.
For me, the peculiarities are usually of a theatrical kind (and I have just been amazed, looking at my account of the Brighton Trunk Crimes, that I somehow resisted the temptation to attach a footnote to the first of its several references to the adjacent town of Hove, noting that in the programme for a Brighton light-operatic society’s production of Oklahoma! a misprint appeared in the list of musical numbers, giving local significance to one of them by entitling it “People Will Say We’re in Hove.”
Grimness is sufficiently in the tales; there is no need for it in the telling of them. Remembering that if the “s” is detached from “slaughter,” one is left with “laughter,” I hope that my sense of (often gallows) humour, my delight in unintended oddities, chimes with yours.