Hacks and robbers

Readers of advanced years like me will almost certainly remember the bow-tied figure of Edgar Lustgarten, star of any number of ‘True Crime’ B movies which were an integral part of a visit to the cinema, or ‘flicks’, when we were young. Some of us also remember his catchphrase when describing the downfall of a murderer, if only because it was a favourite of The Spectator’s one-time political columnist Alan Watkins: ‘It was then that he made his first big mistake.’ As it happens The Spectator features in Lustgarten’s own story, one of many to be told in Duncan Campbell’s very entertaining new book about crime reporting past and present. For it was when walking down the street in December 1978 while reading The Spectator that Lustgarten suffered a heart attack and died.

It was news to me that, prior to his sad demise, Lustgarten, who had many years before chronicled the career of the famous ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer George Joseph Smith, was himself implicated in a bathroom corpse mystery. A girlfriend of his called Gabrielle was discovered dead in his bath after Lustgarten had several times confided that he wanted to end their relationship. Had the great man likewise made his first and last big mistake?

Crime reporting involves three groups of citizens: crooks, policemen and hacks. The last two groups have always had a symbiotic relationship, the police relying on journalists to assist them with publicity, the journalists needing the police to give them tip-offs.

This was never a very satisfactory state of affairs. Journalists formed themselves into a lobby, the Crime Reporters Association — ‘an elite body who can be trusted with confidential information to mutual advantage’, in the words of the CRA’s president, Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express.