A neighbor interrupted a rose-bush-pruning reverie of mine the other morning to exclaim with gusto: “Well, I see you’ve got another juicy murder case on your hands over there!”
I glanced hastily around to see if by chance I had overlooked a body somewhere in my matutinal peregrinations.
But it quickly developed that by “you” my friend meant not me personally but my native England; and that by “juicy murder case” he was referring to what I dare say some English newspaper by now has cited as “The Unfortunate Occurrences at Eastbourne.” These involved, you may recall, what is alleged to be a rather phenomenal succession of demises of elderly, moneyed patients of a single doctor, and his subsequent arrest on charges of having unduly sped the parting clients.
But the part of my neighbor’s utterance that interested me particularly was the single word “another.”
“What do you mean, ‘another’?” I asked, defensively. “It was my impression there were occasional homicides in the United States, too.”
“Oh, sure,” he conceded. “But you know—they aren’t like those cases of yours . . .”
I winced again at the personal pronoun. But I sensed what he was driving at. Crime in England often does seem to have a specially fascinating aura.
As one to whom crime, in fictitious pictorial forms, is by way of being a livelihood, I have often been asked, and consequently have done some pondering, about why this difference exists. Why should infraction of the law—particularly of the Sixth Commandment—be more intriguing in Bedfordshire than Boise, Idaho? How had England, with less than one-third the population of the United States and a relative handful of homicides annually—the comparison is something like 7,000 to less than 300—managed to contribute so spectacularly to the literature of crime which occupies (without chauvinistic distinction) a half-dozen shelves of my library?
It seems to me there are two basic reasons:
(1) English crimes—and I am thinking particularly of murder—tend to be intrinsically more dramatic.
(2) When they do occur, perhaps because of their relative rarity, more is made of them—more juice is squeezed out, as it were; that juice is one of England’s invisible exports to the United States.
There are, of course, a number of basic sociological differences between Britain and the United States which savants have long noted as a basis for differences in the form which the lamentable practice of murder takes.
England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland together are smaller than a number of individual states over here. If one commits a murder in Hollywood, for instance, he has within a couple of hours drive an expanse of desert bigger than the whole United Kingdom in which to dispose tastefully of the remains. In England, a murderer is faced with such stringent alternatives as the cellar or a trunk. If he chooses the latter, he then checks it at a railway station. Right away you have “The Waterloo Station Trunk Murder,” pregnant with drama.
England’s small expanse necessitates many people living close together. Down the centuries, this has brought about an inordinate regard for personal privacy. If Mr. Jones’ wife suddenly disappears, instead of its being a subject of back-fence talk the next morning, it may be months before someone says: “Err, don’t mean to pry at all, old boy, but it seems a deuced long time since we’ve had the pleasure of Mrs. Jones’ presence . . .”
Dr. Crippen’s famous disposal of his wife (a classic case, of which more later) came to light less because of her absence than because her jewelry was observed adorning another woman—a circumstance even an English woman could not resist calling attention to. In the Eastbourne affair, it apparently was years before anyone had the temerity to suggest that the doctor’s therapeutic batting average seemed to be slipping badly.
This regard for personal privacy is one of the facets of what Punch has illuminated humorously as “The British Character” which I think underlies the criminological disparities between opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Racial diversity in other parts of the world has produced various attitudes toward the law and the taking of human life. Among the so-called “hot-blooded” people, homicides often are spur-of-the-moment matters with few subtleties to dwell on. England’s population is quite homogeneously composed of people renowned for their reserve. Emotions and urges to which other peoples give ready vent are by tradition and habit bottled up. When they emerge, the manifestation is likely to be accordingly more bizarre.
I am thinking, for instance, of the Adelaide Bartlett case around the turn of the century. An aging shopkeeper married a young girl, who soon found the attentions of the local parson more exciting than her husband’s—with, it was testified, the husband’s sanction; he liked to watch them neck. Still, the old fellow became obtrusive, and was dispatched with chloroform, which “burned the lining of the stomach as he lay in a recumbent position.” Mrs. Bartlett and her lover were acquitted because the jury, while avowedly “suspicious,” could not discover how chloroform could be introduced into a person’s stomach without his cooperation. The medical profession later appealed to the principals, in the name of science, to explain how it was done—but got no answer.
Some of the more celebrated American murders—such as the Lizzie Borden, Hall-Mills, and Snyder-Gray cases—it will be observed, have an English flavor in their implications of long-suppressed passions, released in devious and tortuous ways.
But with something like twenty homicides occurring in the United States for every one in England, it still is curious that England should seem to out-produce this country in intriguing crimes.
I would attribute this in part to the British capacity for “making do” with what they have, and also to an ingrained racial sense of drama which, despite its concealment behind impassive visages, has appeared intermittently in history all the way from Shakespeare to Shaw.
Drama—particularly the melodrama of crime—involves contrast. In films, I like to take a lurid situation and counterpoint it with understatement. A man is carrying a bomb in a satchel; a checkroom clerk refuses it—not because it has a bomb in it but because it is all greasy.
This same sort of understatement is an occupational tradition of English police. With the most atrocious criminals, they never bluster up and say, “O.K.—we gotcha!” They say: “I beg your pardon, but it seems that someone has been boiled in oil. We wondered if you’d mind answering a few questions about it. . . .”
The Crippen case was fraught with understatement, restraint, and characteristic British relish for drama.
Dr. Crippen was a quack dentist—from Detroit, incidentally—who opened an office in London, became enamored of his petite secretary, Ethel LeNeve, and relegated his wife to a grave under the cellar door. The appearance of the wife’s jewelry on Miss LeNeve spurred inquiries about Mrs. Crippen.
After vouchsafing that she had gone to California and had died there, Dr. Crippen vanished, along with Miss LeNeve. They were on a British liner bound for Montreal, disguised as “Mr. Robinson and Master Robinson,” when the first oceanic wireless alarm ever flashed for a criminal alerted the ship’s captain. He quickly spotted the “boy’s” disguise. He could have locked the two up forthwith. But instead he attenuated the quest in little games, such as making “Mr. Robinson” laugh so he could check distinctive features of his dentures. It was not until Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard, who had hopped a faster liner, boarded the ship in the St. Lawrence River, that the jig was formally up. Inspector Dew’s salutation was: “Good morning, Dr. Crippen. . . .”
The British judicial mechanism seems timed almost with an eye for dramatic pace. There is only one court of appeal; it customarily rules on a case inside of a fortnight. British sentences by ancient tradition are supposed to be executed “within three clear Sundays.” The possibility of swift doom endows a case with far more tension than the usual prospect in this country of a series of appeals that may go on for years until everybody is quite tired of it.
The rigid British libel laws contribute to the dramatic impact even of cases which intrinsically may have no more excitement than many in the United States. Newspapers are precluded from much discussion of a case before trial. Once the trial begins, every detail is seized and savored. Justice has a ritualistic vocabulary of provocative euphemism. Victims of sexual attacks, for instance, have been “interfered with.” In the recent trial of John Haigh, who disposed of three women in barrels of sulphuric acid, there was repeated resort to the ominous word “sludge.”
There is a group of intellectuals in London called Our Society which meets periodically in a private room at some London restaurant to “postmortem” interesting criminal trials. Counsel for both sides attend and let their hair down, off the record. Often even the judge in the case attends and the exhibits are shown. The auditors may include journalists, novelists, playwrights, and even actors. (Sir Henry Irving, incidentally, was an avid attender of major trials.) Interest of this sort tends to make cases, if only retrospectively, causes célèbres, thus creating an atmosphere of anticipation for the next one.
The question arises why, if English murder cases are so fraught with drama, more are not used as the basis for motion pictures. (Of the dozens of films I have made, none has been based on an actual case.)
The answer is a technical one. In real-life crime, public interest is focused on the identification and conviction of the murderer. He is not a “sympathetic” figure of the sort films customarily have as their protagonists, and his fate is already known. This vitiates the vital element the trade calls “rooting interest.” In Suspicion, the story of a wife who suspects her husband of being a homicidal maniac, I had to make the suspicion ultimately a figment of her imagination. The consensus was that audiences would not want to be told in the last few frames of film that as popular a personality as Cary Grant was a murderer, doomed to exposure.
And now, if you will excuse me, I shall get back to my rose bushes—with the lingering thought, from the shock of my neighbor’s salutation, that there still may be a body somewhere on the premises. That is one situation, I readily concede, which would be more pregnant with drama than any body in England.
“Murder—With English on It” was originally published in the New Tork Times Magazine, March 3, 1957, 17, 42.