The long arm of technology

According to George Orwell, even homicide had its golden age. In his 1946 essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, he discusses what he calls ‘our great period in murder’, which was roughly from 1850 to 1925. He holds up nine murders (and ten murderers) whose reputations, he says, have stood the test of time. Jack the Ripper is among them, of course, but he is a category of his own. In the other eight cases, the murderers and their victims were almost entirely middle-class, the settings domestic and poison the favoured weapon. One of these — and arguably the locus classicus, as it were, of the Golden Age of Murder — was the Crippen case.

There has not been a major re-examination of the case for nearly 30 years. David James Smith’s book is welcome on that ground alone, all the more so because many of the case’s details are still obscure. Some earlier accounts, both at the time of the trial and afterwards, did not let historical accuracy stand in the way of a good story or a quick buck.

The main facts are clear. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American, a mild-mannered little man with a qualification in homeopathic medicine. He made his living selling patent medicines and treatments. His wife Belle, also American, was a music-hall artiste, though by this time in her life performing had taken second place to socialising with her colleagues. She was a plump, effervescent woman who lavished money on her clothes. On the surface, at least, the couple seemed comfortably off and reasonably content with each other. In January 1910, however, after supper with friends, Crippen poisoned his wife, dismembered her and buried most of the pieces in the cellar of their north London home; the head was never found.