During the summer of 1864 the British newspaper-reading public was gripped by reports of the first ever murder on their railways. First came descriptions of the discovery of a bloody railway carriage and the battered body of an elderly, respected City man. Police posters on street corners across the land screamed bloody murder. A crushed hat, found in the compartment but not belonging to the victim, was the only clue.
Shock was quickly followed by widespread anxiety. Fear began to radiate along the length of every train and, as the reaction of the public grew more febrile, some considered arming themselves and others wondered if they should make out their wills before embarking on a train journey. The violent assault on Thomas Briggs in his First Class compartment trounced the public’s peace of mind by bursting out of the usual backstreet or domestic loci to suggest that danger was random and that one’s ordinary day could be plunged into chaotic hell. Further, it reinforced existing contemporary anxieties about the price that might have to be paid for all this shiny modernity. It apparently proved that the nation’s cleverness had spawned its vulnerability.
‘Sensation’ novels – like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s infamous Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) – were then the rage, catching the public imagination and selling in their tens of thousands. Designed to unsettle readers, their complex plots revolved around stolen inheritances, poisonings, imprisonments, adulteries, illegitimacies and night-shrouded skulduggery. Their settings were not the urban criminal underworld favoured by Dickens but the apparently safe domesticity of rural country houses, insinuating that there were cracks within the Victorian ideal. Titillating with their tales of mystery, suspense and danger, they mirrored emotive press coverage of brutal crime and fed the Victorian appetite for reading about transgression. As Mrs Braddon put it, they were morbid, hideous and delicious. In other words, fear was a large part of their appeal.
The murder of Mr Briggs, then, was supra-sensational – as if the plot of a sensation novel were spilling over into reality. And it also played on a pervading sense of latent danger that had begun to develop during the 1860s, an increasing social anxiety about the rapidity of change. Admiration of ever-accelerating progress spawned pride, but the 1860s generation were also grappling with the resulting destabilisation of many of the religious, scientific and social orthodoxies that had sustained society for centuries.
As they wondered whether they had imperilled the stability of the past by putting their faith in invention, mid-Victorian readers soon tired of sensation. ‘Truth’ was craved instead, ripening the time for the true ‘detective’ novel: Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone was published in 1868, followed by the Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and the appearance of Sherlock Holmes a decade later.
Like sensation novels, these new literary crimes would, in the main, be remote from the cities but what set them apart was that they typically contained within a defined space a number of potential suspects all with motive and opportunity. Masterful description of place rooted them, apparently, in a ‘real’ world, creating a pervasive atmosphere of threat while skilfully manipulating pace. At the centre of it all, the literary detective would focus on simple clues, defying the fortuitous ‘chances’ that defined reality and solving ingenious puzzles with his rapier intelligence. Superhero rather than a fallible man, he would root out evil and deliver the illusion of certainty.
British crime writing – both fictional and, to some extent, non-fictional – has continued to be quicker than most other genres at picking up on society’s fears about its present state or its technological future. From Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, through the writing of PD James and Ruth Rendell and to Rankin, Billingham and Kate Summerscale’s Whicher, we invest as readers in the solving of the puzzle, admiring the skill of the creator while simultaneously, subconsciously, craving the resumption of the moral order.
There are of course exceptions, most notably in the sharper-edge of hard-boiled American crime writing from Ellery Queen onwards and in the post Watergate, dystopian writing of Joseph Wambaugh. Yet, when considering the literary-crime flourishings of the late 1860s, the inter-war period and towards the end of the 1970s there is more than a little truth in the fact that we turn to this genre most particularly in times of social disequilibrium or anxiety. As we wrestle with the global impact of natural disasters, political uprisings, war, population explosion, food security, terrorism and the digital revolution, it is (historically) unsurprising that, once again, sales of true crime and literary detection are on an apparently inexorable rise.
Kate Colquhoun is a historian and author. Her new book Mr Briggs’ Hat is published today. You can follow her on Twitter @wearyhousewife
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