22 
Land & Water 
April 4, 191 8 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Squire 
Murders • 
MR. H. B. Irving — a very fine lago one remem- 
bers — has long beguiled his leisure with 
criminal research, and his new Book of 
Remarkable Criminals (Cassell, 7s. 6d.) is 
his third or fourth work of the kind. He 
tells here the stories of six famous criminals, and of four 
pairs who worked in conjunction. One may regret that he 
confined himself entirely here to persons who committed at 
least one murder (for ingenious theft is delightful to read 
about) ; and, if one is insular, ohc may be sorry that so many 
of his criminals are French ones, moving in a milieu, and 
speaking a language, which are not familiar to us. But his 
Frenchmen are excellently selected, and his Anglo-Saxons, 
include Peace, who was only incidentally a murderer, and 
•who, indeed, lumself reaUsed at the close of his career that 
his murders had been highly reprehensible. "My great 
mistake, sir," he said to the clergyman who visited him in 
the condemned cell, "and I can see it now as my end 
approaches, has been this — in all my career, I have used 
ball cartridge. I can see now that in using ball cartridge 
1 did wrong. I ought' to have used blank cartridge ; then 
I would not have taken life." 
Charley Peace deserves the long chapter he gets. He has 
claims to be considered the greatest of English criminals. 
It is impossible to like him : he was of repulsive appearance 
and a most monstrous egoist. But he had some qualities 
on a heroic scale — courage, alertness, impudence, imagina- 
tion. The man whose execution the English crowd deplored 
and whose betraj'er they nicknamed "Traitress Sue" was 
not the whole Charles Peace of real life, but the sly fox who 
got out through the roof when tlie police were downstairs ; 
who, in disguise, discussed his own crimes with interest 
and reprehension ; who wandered about earning his Hving 
as a fiddler under the noses of the authorities ; who lived for 
two years in Streatham as a Christian old gentleman, enter- 
taining the neighbours to charming musical evenings and, 
at a later hour of the night, sallying out at the back door 
with pony, cart, lantern, and crib-cracking tools to plunder 
their houses — that, and the daring adventurer who, even 
at the last, leapt out of the window of the train, and only 
failed to escape his warders b\' breaking his leg. Before 
him, all Mr. Irving's other criminals pale ; but one may 
commend the philosophic Robert Butler (who said he had 
modelled himself on Napoleon and Frederick the Great), 
Professor Webster, and H. H. Holmes of America, a smug 
fiend whose pertinacity and cunning were only equalled by 
those of the man who ran him down. Webster was a Pro- 
fessor of Chemistry at Harvard and a colleague of that quite 
unimpeachable professor who wrote The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table. He was a family man ; a fairly good 
scientist ; benevolent-looking, sociable, spectacled, middle- 
aged. Yet — and it is still uncertain whether the crime was 
premeditated or the result of momentary exasperation — he 
slew an old friend who had lent him money and discovered 
him in trickery. And, having slain him, he cut him up 
into small pieces, buried bits of him, burned other bits, and 
worked for days at the job behind closed doors. Had.it not 
been for the refusal of a fine set of teeth to be incinerated 
he might never have Been condemned- though he would 
certainly have been suspected. As for Holmes, he is a 
remarkable example of how one thing leads to another. 
His original intention was merely to swindle an insurance 
company ; a thing that many people would consider as 
only less venial than cheating a railway company. This led 
him into murder. Having murdered one man, it became 
necessary, in order to cover up his tracks,' to get rid of the 
deceased person's family — six in number. He had disposed 
of three when he was caught. Had he been given away by 
nothing else, he would, to the percipient eye, have been 
hopelessly betrayed by his protest to the bereaved mother : 
"Surely you cannot think that I would murder innocent 
children, especially without a motive." His story, Hke the 
others, is told by Mr. Irving with commendable precision. 
Tennyson once told Mr. Irving's father that he and Jowett 
had sat up talking well into the small hours of the morning. 
Asked what thej' were talking about, the poet said "murders." 
Some people would affect to be shocked at this in Tennyson ; 
though the same people would read Browning's The Ring 
and the Book with interest and admiration merely because 
the murder with which, and its concomitant circumstances, 
the poem is wiiolly concerned took place some hundreds of 
years ago, and is, consequently, history and not mere vulgar 
crime. But one doubts whether there Ls a man alive who 
lias not at least the inclination to read murder trials, however 
much he may be ashamed of it. That this interest in murders 
is not — as is sometimes hastily assumed — a dcl)ased craving 
for mere blood is proved by the fact that ordinary straight- 
forward murders in hot blood get no space in the news- 
papers. What provoke men's curiosity are mysteries, 
mysteries of motive or stratagem ; astute or daring plots ; 
the unaccountable lapses of respectable citizens ; the opera- 
tions of the mind in self-justification ; the battle of wits 
between criminal and police. If a man, in a fit of sudden 
temper, "takes a chopper to some one," and then kills him- 
self or delivers himself up to the police, no sane person, out 
of mere blood-lust, will read about him. The man we r6ad 
about is he who, possessing fine qualities of courage or clever- 
ness, endeavours to cover up his tracks ; the oddity who, 
apparentlv normal, secretly poisons- his fellows wholesale. 
We enjoy the adventures and the escapes — we even appre- 
ciate good burglaries better than good murders because we 
are spared the horrors — we are curious to know precisely 
where it is that the criminal's mind differs from ours, and 
we habitually, though often unconsciously, match our own 
resourcefulness, in face of all the legal engines of civilisation, 
with that of the man who has actually "done the job." For, 
in the last resort, the murderer and the burglar, the daring 
criminal and the desperate fugitive, have done in the flesh 
things that we all do in our minds. 
I do not suggest that there are no differences between 
criminals as a class and ordinary people, though there are 
a good many ordinary people among criminals and a good 
many very wicked men who will never see the inside of a 
jail, "and can often be found on the inside of a church. Some 
of Mr. Irving's murderers were criminals owing to environ- 
ment or an accident that might have happened to anyone ; 
but some certainly committed their crimes because they 
lacked some restraint, of reason, of morals, of human sym- 
pathy, of pity, which in most of us keeps the murderous 
impulse in check. But we all have the law-breaker in us, 
even though our better, or our more calculating, selves keep 
him permanently in a strait waistcoat. I do not believe 
there is a man alive (always excepting the Archbishop of 
Canterbury) who has never, sitting innocently in his chair 
or lying peacefully in his bed, pictured himself committing 
a crime and then trying to evade the consequences. Charles 
Peace ? Jack the Ripper ? Why, they were merely the 
projections of lines in our own mental diagrams I In 
animosity we have played with the idea of getting rid of 
our abominable private enemy or that politician whom we 
regard as a Wight on the country ; and, still more often, 
with our private passions totally disengaged, we 'hare played 
crime as a game. . We also have fired the bullet through a 
lighted window, tipped the man out of a train or over a 
bridge, poisoned thousands in a quite undetectable way, 
traded on our respectable reputations to burgle our neigh- 
bours, blown up rails, soaked straw with paraffin, hidden 
in the house in Belgrave Square, burrowed long tunnels 
under banks, broken jewellers' windows and bolted. We 
also have passed ir/ twenty towns under twenty names, 
Hke H. H. Holmes, played the suburban philanthropist and 
music-lover like Peace, shaved and grown beards, had secret 
dug-outs, hidden suits of clothes, obtained our revolvers, 
poisons, and notepaper from places which would give no 
clue. Yes, above all, we have avoided those absurd clues. 
We never wear shirts spattered with little rusty spots which 
"prove, on examination under the microscope, to be human 
blood." We never carry compromising papers, leave our 
laundry-marks about, repeat ourselves, overreach ourselves, 
rashly confide in fellow-criminals, turn pale at inconvenient 
moments, or lose our nerve when a policeman accosts us, or 
publicly threaten to "do somebody in." We do what we 
like. Our victims are an easy prey. Our lairs are crammed 
with diamonds, gold watches, bullion, petrol, margarine, 
sugar, and matches. We go on for ever and are never caught. 
That is where we differ from the ordinary criminal. But we 
are close enough to take an interest in him ; and an5'one 
who reads Mr. Irving's bodk will find it fascinating. 
