‘Wherever God erects a house of prayer,’ wrote an early crime reporter called Daniel Defoe, ‘the Devil always builds a chapel there; And ’twill be found, upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation.’
The same applies to the news – stories of crime and the underworld have, for centuries, attracted the largest of readerships. But how did people become so interested in all those devilish miscreants – the bandits, the highwaymen, the murderers, the outlaws, the gangsters, the robbers, the cat-burglars, the conmen, the getaway drivers, the men and women who broke all the rules?
The Bible described how Adam and Eve were caught stealing forbidden fruit. Was that the first crime report? Was their banishment the earliest coverage of a criminal sentence, and was the killing of Abel by Cain the original murder story to whet the appetite of the reading public?
Crime reporting has been a staple of news since the first newsbooks, chapbooks and broadsides, as the early forms of the press were known, were sold in the wake of public hangings centuries ago, some of them initially read aloud for the benefit of the illiterate. From the capture of the highwayman, Dick Turpin, and the execution of the great escaper, Jack Sheppard, in the eighteenth century, to the hunt for Jack the Ripper and the scandal of child prostitution in Victorian England, to the Brides in the Bath murders during the First World War, the Old Bailey trial of the Kray twins in the 1960s and the funerals of the great train robbers in the 2010s, the fascination with the transgressive has remained unabated. Some themes are constant. ‘Crime in England this century has increased 400 per cent, in Ireland 800 per cent and in Scotland above 3,500 per cent,’ Blackwood’s Magazine told its readers in 1844. The causes were clear. Big cities were partly to blame because ‘restraint of character, relationship and vicinity are lost in the urban crowd’ but there were other culprits: ‘the employment of women has destroyed the familial bond, emancipating the young from parental control.’ Twenty years later, another factor in the growth of crime was spotted by The Times: ‘under the influence of philanthropic sentiments and hopeful policy we have deprived the law of its terrors and justice of its arms.’ A century and a half on, panic about lawlessness, dismay at the behaviour of the young and criticism of over-lenient punishments still provide a backdrop to the coverage of crime.
Why such interest? Why does the old news-desk motto, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, still hold true? The writer Thomas De Quincey, in his famous satirical essay ‘Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827, wrote of how he came across the case of John Williams, accused of killing seven people in east London in what were known as the Ratcliffe Highway murders: ‘in came the London morning papers, by which it appeared that, but three days before, a murder the most superb of the century by many degrees had occurred in the heart of London’. In a postscript published in 1854, De Quincey added: ‘[E]very day of the year we take up a paper, we read the opening of a murder. We say, this is good, this is charming, this is excellent!’
Charles Dickens, in a letter to the Daily News on 28 February 1846, on the subject of the death penalty, noted that ‘there is about it a horrible fascination, which, in the minds . . . of good and virtuous and well-conducted people, supersedes the horror legitimately attracting to crime itself, and causes every word and action of a criminal under sentence of death to be the subject of a morbid interest and curiosity.’ He felt that such reports were published ‘because they are read and sought for . . . it is in the secret nature of those of whom society is made up, to have a dark and dreadful interest in the punishment at issue.’ A decade later, in his poem ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, Robert Browning returned to the theme: ‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things./The honest thief, the tender murderer,/the superstitious atheist.’ And an interest in dark and dreadful criminals and far from tender murderers has been cited as one factor in increasing literacy in Britain in the wake of the Education Acts of 1870 and 1880, when the press reported every detail of the wicked offenders and their progress to the scaffold.
Newspapers themselves pondered on the fascination and sought to justify it in different ways. ‘This appetite of the mind for particulars of great crimes and criminals has been stigmatised as vulgar,’ said the Daily Telegraph in 1881, after running tens of thousands of words on the case of a murderer called Percy Lefroy Mapleton, who killed a man in the first-class carriage of the Brighton to London train. ‘It is only vulgar in so far as it is universal, the common attribute of every age, people and clime.’ The Athenians, it was suggested, were just like us because they were thrilled by Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and the fact that he had killed his father and married his mother. The paper concluded that ‘public attention dwells on the life story of a great criminal as it hunts out the moral of a literary or pictorial satire. In both cases the analytical faculty stimulates the intellect to an exhaustive inquiry.’ Well, up to a point. But certainly the ways in which crime is reported over the centuries, the language used, the judgments made, the prejudices revealed, create their own rich history.
Crime is, in many ways, the prism through which we see society and its anxieties and phobias. What are the most egregious offences? How should they be punished? Are offenders bad or mad? In 1910, a young Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, made a speech in which he explained: ‘the mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.’ Crime reports are a running commentary on those unfailing tests. And the crimes reported deal with the most visceral emotions – hate, love, greed, desire, fear, jealousy, anger, revenge, redemption, compassion – and shine a light on a nation’s attitudes to sex, race, gender, religion, property, wealth and power.
A day in a magistrates’ court provides as illuminating a snapshot as any lengthy think-tank report or ministerial briefing on the state of education, immigration, unemployment, drug use, alcoholism, mental health and popular culture, not to mention policing, the criminal justice system and the failures or successes of government policies. Nor is it a grim beat; the phrase ‘gallows humour’ did not come from nowhere. Life and death. Human nature. Drama. As Mitchell Stephens noted in his book A History of News, ‘criminals and their victims, even given the heavy-handedness of most crime coverage, may be the most fully drawn characters in the news’. And as Edgar Wallace, himself a crime reporter before becoming the best-selling author in Britain, remarked: ‘My experience of crime reporting taught me a great deal about humanity that has been very useful to me.’ No wonder the television channels overflow every day with fictional and non-fictional criminals and detectives.
Is it a British thing? Murder certainly seems to be, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that our murder rates are low and detection rates high. The title of this book comes from a catch-phrase uttered by a character called Minnie Bannister in the 1950s BBC radio comedy series The Goon Show. Everyone laughed when Minnie said it, not least because no one thought there was a possibility of it ever happening to them. ‘Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject,’ wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in 1934, in a preface to a short stories collection of mystery, detection and horror. She was writing about its fictional portrayal but murder and its detection and punishment has been responsible for the sales of countless newspapers. The abolition of the death penalty in 1965 was blamed by at least one Fleet Street editor for the subsequent decline in the sales of evening papers.
Reports of crime have been accused of both fuelling fear by highlighting the horrific and of glamorising gangsters by treating them sometimes as likeable rogues. Wallace did not subscribe to the idea of the romantic criminal: ‘Criminals are stupid, treacherous and dull people. The only interesting criminals are those I write about in my books.’
Nevertheless, many bad boys and girls in history have been painted in a favourable light. The comedian and director Mel Brooks, in his majestic comedy routine The 2,000-Year-Old Man, recorded in 1961, plays the part of someone who has lived to this incredible age and met everyone from Jesus Christ to Joan of Arc. He is asked by an interviewer, played by Carl Reiner, if he ever met Robin Hood. Of course, he had. Was it true, asked the interviewer, that he robbed the rich and gave to the poor? ‘No, he robbed everybody and kept everything!’
Crime reporters have, of necessity, had a symbiotic relationship with both police and criminals throughout history. All sides have had reason to embellish and exaggerate their deeds: the criminals to justify or explain their acts, the police to make it look like they are successful and even-handed, and the reporters to impress with their inside knowledge. The hardest three words for any journalist to say remain ‘I don’t know’.
The crimes and the punishments reported over the years are often shocking – from Dick Turpin holding an elderly man’s bare buttocks over a fire to force him to reveal where his money was hidden in the early eighteenth century to the debonair John George Haigh dissolving his victims in acid in the 1940s. Shocking, too, is the relish with which some crimes and punishments were reported and shocking sometimes in the preconceptions, prejudices and ignorance displayed. But there have been great acts of bravery and fine writing; from Dickens in the Daily News to W. T. Stead’s exposé of child prostitution in the Pall Mall Gazette and the campaign that led to the jailing of the killers of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.
My first exposure to this world was through a magazine called True Detective, at a time in the 1950s when I should have been reading more wholesome fare, like The Eagle or The Children’s Newspaper. I started to swap Agatha Christie and genteel country-house murder for the grainy black-and-white photos of real crime scenes and detectives called Bob or Jim rather than Hercule or Miss Marple. Sometimes in the background there would be a chap with a notebook. A crime reporter. What a job!
In the same decade, the famous and far from bashful Superintendent Robert Fabian – Fabian of the Yard, as he liked to be known – wrote The Boy’s Book of Scotland Yard; girls were presumed not to be interested. In it he informed any curious nippers that ‘[behind] a scarcely noticeable green door is a room with men playing cards, perhaps, or reading or just smoking and chatting . . . They are the crime reporters of the national newspapers . . . They more than anyone else are the link between you, the public and the police. You want to know what the police are doing. You can’t go and see for yourself but you can read about it in your newspaper.’
I met my first professional criminal, a charming fraudster who had studied economics at Jesus College, Cambridge – or so he said – in Perth prison in 1962 when, as part of a team of cocky schoolboys, I debated with prisoners whether going to the moon would be a good idea. I interviewed my first chief constable in 1965, a legendary character called Wee Willie Merrilees – five inches too short for the police but given a special dispensation – who was one of the Most Unforgettable Characters in the Reader’s Digest. One of his coups as a police officer was an operation in which he had hidden himself in a pram disguised as a baby to catch a molester active in Edinburgh at the time. Was this my first lesson in the old-school rule of journalism – ‘too good to check’? He also told me, chillingly, how the police in the thirties had cleared up the ‘homo problem’ in Edinburgh by rounding up the clientele of the city’s few gay bars and putting them on a non-stop Flying Scotsman to London.
Down in London, in the dark days of the seventies, I saw some detectives cheerfully lie to ensure convictions – and then saw them again years later in the dock themselves. I also called 999 a few times myself in response to nearby screams and violence, and was always impressed by the fearless way young, unarmed police men and women leapt from their vans to grapple with a violent bully.
I soon learned another important journalistic lesson: never assume. Not everyone fitted the stereotype. I got to know a former armed robber – he gave it up because he found prison so boring – who was an early beneficiary of the Open University. One night in the pub I noticed that he was reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I mentioned this to another OU-graduate armed robber who replied dismissively: ‘Not her best.’ And I met a detective who knew as much about Harold Pinter, Bob Dylan, the French impressionists and Native American battle plans as any critic or historian.
And the job? Is it as exciting as it is portrayed in plays and films like The Front Page or in Edgar Wallace novels? One of the first cases I covered in any detail was a 1970s double-murder trial at the Old Bailey. Two men, both professional criminals, had been accused of killing two others, the body of one of the victims being cut up and dumped in the Thames, thus leading to this being known as the Torso Murder case. I had been told there was something dodgy about the case and indeed there was. The trial took six months and it had everything: the prison informer; the detective nicknamed ‘the Old Grey Fox’; the accusations that the defendants had been ‘verballed up’ (compromising words attributed to them by the police); the gilded barristers from the other side of the tracks; the relatives of the living and the dead; the conflicted jury; the different verdicts; the furious protests from the dock. Many years later the informer admitted to me in a bar in Brighton that he had made his evidence up. The two men were eventually cleared but only after spending more than twenty years behind bars.
Hanging round the Old Bailey, gradually getting to know the participants from both sides of the fence – and the people who wrote about them – was an apprenticeship. The windowless press room in the bowels of the Bailey has barely changed over the years, although the gents next to it is now a prayer-room – prompting the observation from one old crime reporter that, not for the first time, people are found in there on their knees.
Most crime reporters, current and retired, would not have swapped the job for any other. As the old police recruiting slogan had it: ‘Dull, it isn’t.’ Unlike many other forms of journalism, there is often a beginning, middle and end. A crime. An arrest. A trial. A sentence. But there is so much more in between: who are the people involved, the perpetrators and the victims? What were the motives? There is always a story within the story.
It’s about people at their best and worst, their bravest and most cowardly. Human and inhuman nature. I have met a woman who spent six years trying to confront in prison the man who murdered her daughter and who found a kind of peace as a result, and I have met a man who, at the time, was only staying alive so that he could kill his daughter’s killer once he finally emerged from jail. I have seen a murderer acquitted, leaving the court sniggering at the jury’s gullibility and heard later that he now wanted to confess because he had been unable to sleep properly ever since.
The crimes being reported have changed. My earliest efforts as a student journalist in the 1960s were about abortion and homosexuality, both then against the law, although soon to be legalised. The drugs squad in the Met police at that time consisted of one cheery sergeant. Throughout the second half of the last century, the main reports of professional crime concerned organised robberies. Such highly-planned events still happen in this century – as the theft of an estimated £14 million from safe-deposit boxes in Hatton Garden over the Easter weekend in 2015 demonstrated – but are much rarer.
Acquisitive crime through the internet has started to replace them and public opprobrium has shifted from the ‘ODC’s – the ordinary decent criminals – to the legal chancers, the bankers, tax dodgers and financial wide boys. It was not Robert Browning but Bertolt Brecht who was worth quoting: ‘What is robbing a bank compared to founding one?’ The fortunes of the family firms that ran crime in Britain half a century ago (the Krays, the Richardsons and others) have mirrored what has happened to British business. They have been replaced by often faceless multinationals anxious to avoid the limelight.
There have been changes, too, for reporters over the years. The earliest reports in this book were often anonymously written, by clerics or lawyers or authors. By-lined journalism did not become standard until the last century. And until the last few decades of the twentieth century crime reporters were almost uniformly male and white.
Journalism has changed in other more dramatic ways, firstly through the arrival of radio and television and more recently with the decline of the printed press and the attendant growth of the internet and online news. Reporters have responded to the digital revolution much like Eastern Europeans to the collapse of the Soviet Union: some embraced the new world with evangelical fervour, others muttered about the loss of a simpler, more ordered world. The speed of the internet is now a major factor. Rumour used to be halfway round the world before Truth had got its boots on; now Rumour, given wings by Twitter and others, has been twice round the world while Truth is still in its pyjamas.
Major trials, with a very few exceptions, are no longer covered in detail. When they are, reporters are expected to tweet details from the court, constantly under pressure to update, whereas in the past there was time to talk to the detectives, lawyers, witnesses, defendants. Deadlines come by the minute rather than by the day. Much of the writing on crime comes now from a commentariat, selectively picking second-hand details of cases to reinforce an argument or fuel a panic.
Some traces have lingered through the centuries. In 1728, John Gay based his character Macheath, in The Beggar’s Opera, on Jack Sheppard, the most written-about criminal of his day. Can Gay ever have imagined that a song, ‘Mac the Knife’, based on this creation, would one day be the favourite melody of one of Britain’s most notorious gangsters, Ronnie Kray? Public executions at Tyburn or Newgate in London or the Grassmarket in Edinburgh are no longer a staple for crime reporters, but did Dickens and other writers distressed by the mob’s enjoyment of such events ever imagine that millions would one day be watching beheadings on tiny screens?
This is, inevitably, a selective, personal and rough history, from the early days of crime reportage in the seventeenth century to the legal and moral journalistic turmoils of the twenty-first century. While it is mainly in chronological order, there are many overlapping themes, such as the coverage of drugs, of ‘femmes fatales’, of the changing relationships between journalists and police and criminals, of the language of crime reporting. There will be errors and omissions, to which I plead guilty now in exchange for a shorter sentence. The bibliography at the back of the book lists the essential volumes that will give the interested reader much greater detail on many of the characters and subjects explored.