Truly great detectives have always had the wisdom to see that sometimes it takes the intertwining of intelligence, inspiration and good fortune to solve the knottiest cases, and this was even more true before the advent of forensics. The early days of Scotland Yard now provide a fascinating insight into the inspirational deductions of long ago–the way that detecting minds worked on the trickiest of cases without the fallback of technology.
Accordingly, the puzzles in this section have a period flavour about them. A series of challenges calculated to produce chewed lower lips while suggesting something of historical criminals who deliberately set out not only to deceive, but also to bedazzle with apparent impossibilities. And here we go back even further in time than the formation of Scotland Yard, to the ancestors of the Met, the Bow Street Runners.
In the 1700s, the primitive policing for the city was carried out by watchmen and parish constables, and was simply not sufficient for the maze-like and teeming streets of London with their ever-widening range of crimes. Parish councils employed ‘thief takers’, an early form of arresting officer, whose job it was to catch felons and bring them before the magistrate. But the work was difficult and dangerous and gained no respect either from criminals or law-abiding members of the public.
The novelist Henry Fielding, best known today for his rambunctious Tom Jones, was to change this; he was also a magistrate. His house in Bow Street, near Covent Garden, doubled as an extemporised court, and in 1749 he and his brother, Sir John, had the idea of recruiting a group of men whose job it would be to apprehend suspects. These men–six of them at first–became known as the Bow Street Runners. They were initially funded by the Fielding brothers themselves, but after a few years this would change and they would be the first kind of police funded by the government. The Fieldings made it quite clear that for investigations to have any solid legitimacy, and indeed the respect of communities, the men carrying them out had to have the official backing of the state.
Sir John Fielding was blind but his insight was strong. At this time, many crimes went unsolved simply because criminals moved around the country and there was no centralised record system or way of keeping track of them. Magistrates in the north, when faced with wrong-doers who stood before them under assumed identities, claiming to be from towns in the south, had no means of checking, other than sending messages to grand local social acquaintances in the hope they might help.
And so it was that Sir John Fielding laid down the first foundation stone of a national crime database, a means not only of holding details of each offender, but also a way of alerting others in faraway parts that an offender was in their midst. The hot new media of the late 1700s was the newspaper, and so Sir John produced a special version, intended for circulation among town crime fighters up and down the land. It was called Hue and Cry.
This newspaper publicised every crime committed: from forgery of papers to theft of antiques, from violent assault to the darkest murders. The reports carried all the relevant details of these murky cases and when there were suspects, they were named, alongside their full descriptions. By this method–combined with the then dazzlingly fast new services of the Royal Mail, which could carry letters across the country under an unprecedentedly efficient system at speeds of just a few days–criminal profiles began to be built. And with these profiles came the first glimmering of the discipline of criminology: the first sense that patterns could be detected in the actions of certain antisocial recidivists.
Thieves would have had their own idiosyncratic methods; and murderers too would have had a signature style, occasionally unmistakeable. This was the beginning, in effect, of the first criminal database and also the first time that it became clear there was a general fascination with the contest between criminals and law-enforcers. As well as publishing Hue and Cry, Sir John Fielding ensured that popular newspapers received regular briefings from his Bow Street office about the ghastliest and most extraordinary of crimes. Both he and subsequent generations of newspaper editors were to find that there was an enormous public appetite for reading of wrong-doings; and a concomitant appetite to read about those who would solve these mysteries.
The detective department of Scotland Yard–which in 1878 became the Criminal Investigation Department, reformed after a serious case of internal corruption–was founded in a world where the mind was understood in quite a different way from today. Sigmund Freud was yet to turn established notions of motive and impulse on their heads. Added to this, perfectly rational though Victorian detectives were, they were moving through a society that was susceptible in many ways to unexplained phenomena: the rise of spiritualism was the respectable face of the more common belief in ghosts. There are innumerable cases throughout the late 1800s of London suburbs such as Islington and villages near Manchester and Birmingham that succumbed to ghost hysteria: huge crowds gathering in churchyards at midnight in the belief that particular ghosts would walk the yew-lined paths. It was the detectives who had to unmask the spectral troublemakers who were hoping to whip up riotous anarchic behaviour.
Also, before the 1870s, there was next to nothing in the way of forensics (in one 1860 murder case, the most sophisticated item of evidence was a bloody boot-print on a floorboard that was patiently sawed around and presented to the court as though it answered any questions at all). These same detectives had to keep their heads when criminals apparently pulled off feats that were beyond the realm of physics. One such case came in the very earliest years of the department, and it involved a man who was in two different places at exactly the same time: the sort of feat that even today’s quantum physicists would dismiss as science fiction.
The crime was a theft from a mail coach (just before the ever-expanding railway network handled all such business) riding through Kent towards London carrying a substantial sum of money. The actual purloining, it was understood, must have happened at a coaching inn not far from Canterbury.
The police had a shrewd idea of the culprit: a man who had been seen by some witnesses and also had form in this area. The only difficulty was that when he was apprehended, the man concerned told them quite calmly that they were wholly mistaken and he could prove it: he had been in Taunton at the time the robbery was carried out, and there were large numbers of independent witnesses who could corroborate his story. And, indeed, as the police found to their frustration, it was true. He had been in Taunton.
The trouble was that the police knew from even more reliable witnesses that he had also been at that coaching inn just outside Canterbury. He was the man in two places.
Obviously he could not be convicted–and so he went free–but the man-in-two-places conundrum continued to perplex the officers. That is, until the day that he was seen up a ladder–when he was simultaneously working at another house further up the street. The one possibility that everyone had overlooked–the one, incidentally, never allowed by the majority of crime authors as it is just too implausible–was that the man in two places was in fact a twin.
One figure who revelled in such mysteries was Charles Frederick Field. He had been among the very first to join the Yard’s detective branch in 1842, having spent a decade as a constable around London’s most poverty-haunted districts; and indeed, Inspector Field was also the first detective to rise to public prominence and a certain measure of fame. Even though he was no longer on patrols, the Inspector continued to visit London’s rookeries (this was the term for the poorest of dwellings, always over-crowded, dark, rotting, running with damp, smelling foul and incubators of both disease and crime) and on one night, he was joined on his urban rounds by the author Charles Dickens, who was fascinated beyond measure by Field’s detective work, and wished to write about it for his popular journal Household Words. The detective and the author made their way from obscenely broken-down lodging houses in St Giles to a den of habitual offenders in Borough–then back over the river to Whitechapel to inspect the premises of a local villain known for employing thieves.
But Inspector Field had other responsibilities too, at the more fragrant end of society, and he could often be found making his rounds in the eerie night-time galleries of the British Museum, ensuring that no-one was making off with treasure or, indeed, with Egyptian mummies. Another of his assignments involved Lord Lytton, who had written a play–Not So Bad As We Seem–which was to open in a theatre near the Strand. The detective was sent to act as Lord Lytton’s bodyguard because Lytton had received some sinister anonymous threats.
Inspector Field–who might at first have been expecting some kind of assassination attempt–dug a little further into where these threats might have been coming from and soon deduced that they were chiefly the work of his lordship’s estranged wife, Rosina. It seemed that the threat was not quite as dangerous as expected and consisted largely of Rosina disguising herself as an orange seller and then, during the performance, unleashing a volley of rotten fruit upon the stage. That particular assault, although thwarted, was perhaps understandable in the light of his Lordship’s previous dreadful behaviour toward Rosina. Indeed, a few years after that he had her incarcerated in an asylum for a month; an outrage that partly inspired Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.
Incidentally, if that particular case seemed somehow a little light for the detective branch, it is worth bearing in mind that a few decades later, a lot of Sherlock Holmes’s cases involved juicy society scandals wrapped up in mysteries rather than always being a hunt for a killer.
Moving fluidly between social strata, early detectives of both the Bow Street runners and the CID had to cultivate a vital sense of detachment from social judgements; their job was simply to unravel brain-boggling mysteries, and to identify and catch those who were guilty of crimes. They were the dispassionate agents of truth. The puzzles in this section reflect a need for emotionless analysis: the more baroque the mystery (just as in the real-life case of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, who went from digging up bodies for medical researchers, to simply murdering people to keep the level of supply up), the cooler the eye has to be. There is nothing to be gained from rushing to solutions; here are vintage mysteries instead that have to be teased out, even if it becomes a waiting game. The most modern detectives, with access to an entire world’s worth of databases updated in real time, abide by the same principles as their eighteenth-century forerunners. Let’s see if you can make them work for you, too.