In Paris, Dominique de Moro Giafferri kindly shared his memories of his grandfather, Vincent de Moro Giafferri, and made available his private collection of material on the Landru case. I am extremely grateful to him. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Dominique Lanzalavi’s fine biography of Moro, based on the same collection, which contains much previously unpublished information on Landru’s defence barrister.
My friend Laurence Soustras helped me with many tricky translations of French words and phrases, including some obscure early twentieth-century argot. All errors in French are of course my own. I thank her as well for being so interested in the story and giving me a French perspective on l’affaire Landru.
I am grateful to the staff of the Archives de la Préfecture de la Police in Paris and the Archives Départmentales des Yvelines, which together hold all the surviving case files on Landru, as well as most of the photographs reproduced in this book. The rest of my research would have been impossible without online access to the Bibliothèque Nationale’s magnificent newspaper collection. Lastly in France, I thank the many family historians whose research on their ancestors, posted online, gave me crucial biographical information about Landru and his victims.
In Britain, I am grateful to my copy editor Linne Matthews, who saved me from numerous errors and inconsistencies and helped me tell a fiendishly complicated story as clearly as I could. At my publisher Pen & Sword, many thanks to Laura Hirst, who supervised the production, to Emily Robinson, who organised the publicity, and to my commissioning editor Jonathan Wright.
Various friends were enormously helpful at different stages of research, writing and editing. Mark Redhead put me straight about how to start the story and was always ready with encouragement and advice. Sarah Helm read an early draft of the first two chapters and made me realise I had to write them again. Nick Hindley cast his expert psychiatrist’s eye on the murky issue of whether Landru was clinically insane. Amelia Blacker and Paul Unwin helped me narrow an original longlist of more than fifty images down to the pictures you see in this book.As ever, I owe huge thanks to my agent Jane Turnbull for all her support and tireless editorial advice as I inflicted her with more drafts and redrafts of the manuscript than I care to admit.
Finally, I cannot thank enough my partner Tess and our daughter Hannah, who have been endlessly supportive and patient while I laboured over l’affaire Landru.