A Very British Murder (35 page)

This marionette puppet of murder victim Maria Marten belonged to a travelling puppet show company that performed her death as a play in villages across East Anglia.

You can tell that this puppet of Maria’s evil murderer, William Corder, is a villain, by his murderous-looking moustache and his heavy black eyeliner.

A good melodrama, like those based on the wildly popular ‘Murder in the Red Barn’, contained recognizable stock characters such as the village maiden and the dastardly villain. It would always end with wrongs righted and cheers from the audience.

The new Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police was set up in 1842. Inspector Charles Field would become its most celebrated officer.

Charles Dickens was a great admirer of Inspector Field. As a journalist, he wrote articles puffing up the new Detective Branch. As a novelist, Dickens made Field into his character Inspector Bucket in
Bleak House
. Here, Bucket raises his ‘corpulent forefinger’ in speech, just as Field did in real life.

Members of the early police force were greeted with suspicion and fear, but by the time of the ‘Jack The Ripper’ case the Metropolitan Police were well established. Yet prominent failures like this, and the Road Hill House case, undermined their reputation.

The medicine chest said to belong to the archetypal murderer of the 1850s, the poisoner Dr William Palmer. ‘I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine,’ he said on the gallows, taunting the crowd with what was possibly a confession to having used some other drug.

Road Hill House in Wiltshire, location of the original ‘country house mystery’ with its closed cast of family and servants. The killing of a little boy here in 1860 would echo throughout the decade’s ‘sensation’ novels.

The actor Richard Mansfield transforms himself from the evil, crouching Mr Hyde into the good and upright Dr Jekyll. His performance was so frightening that ‘strong men shuddered and women fainted and were carried out of the theatre’.

Sherlock Holmes made his first public appearance in 1887. In this story, he’s seen beating a corpse with a stick. He was researching post-mortem bruising in the course of his innovative work as a forensic scientist.

The cover ofW. S. Hayward’s Revelations of a
Lady Detective
(1864) shows a rather racy lady lifting up her skirt and smoking. She excels at her work because ‘the woman detective has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching’.

After the brutality of the First World War, Hercule Poirot caught on because he was the opposite of an action hero: ‘the neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound’. In contrast, Sidney Paget’s illustrations showed that Sherlock Holmes was no stranger to violence, and was quite capable of chasing and even shooting criminals.