The Invention of Murder (54 page)

In other novels, the sensation elements were assuming less importance, while the detective elements were increasing. Andrew Forrester’s
The Female Detective,
published before Constance Kent’s confession, included ‘A Child Found Dead’, in which a barely fictionalized framing device was inserted around a straightforward recounting of what is presented under the not very disguised name of the ‘Bridge’ murder by a ‘medical man’ who is involved with the family.
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In 1861 J.W. Stapleton, a medical man and friend of Samuel Kent, had published
The Great Crime of 1860,
which did everything in its power to move the spotlight of suspicion from the Kent household. In ‘A Child Found Dead’ ‘nobody is more anxious than the father of the dead child to learn the cause’, and instead of the murderer being a family member twisted with jealous rage, the crime is ‘committed while the murderer was asleep, and while under the influence of murderous monomania’.

This solution leads directly to what T.S. Eliot called ‘the first … and the best of English detective-novels’: Wilkie Collins’
The Moonstone.
‘The best’ is a matter of taste;
The Moonstone
is not the first, although ‘first’ is almost as hard to define as ‘best’: do the detectives have to be professional, do they have to belong to a police force, do they have to be the major precipitating element in the discovery of the criminal, do ‘novels’ include penny-dreadfuls that were then published as single volumes? Mrs Braddon and Dickens had earlier depicted professional policemen; many three-volume novels such as
Miss Jane
had private detectives as characters; Edward Ellis had a female police detective in the penny-blood
Ruth the Betrayer;
and Wilkie Collins had used both professional and amateur detectives in his earlier short stories and in
Armadale.
Where
The Moonstone
was the first was in pulling together many of the elements we now regard as crucial to the genre: the crime is committed at the beginning of the story; the detective(s) follow a series of artfully dropped clues which point to each of the suspects in turn, who are gathered together in one place; the mystery is unravelled at the end by a single person – there is even a ‘sidekick’ character. Not everything was yet in place: no detective solves this case, the policeman vanishing long before the halfway point; the scientist has the right idea, yet even he does not produce the solution, which is patched together by a number of participants – more like the real world, but not much like the super-sleuths of the genre.

A reviewer in the
Spectator
in 1861 described the sensation-novel as ‘a host of cleverly complicated stories, the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unravelling of some carefully prepared enigma’. The sensation-novel was about buried secrets, and their revelation; the detective novel about the person doing the revealing. Wilkie Collins looked both forward and back.
Armadale
was serialized from November 1864 to June 1866, thus beginning five months before Miss Kent’s confession, and ending long after. In it Collins inserted several parallels to the Kent case. Ozias Midwinter is treated harshly by his stepfather; his mother, like the second Mrs Kent, is not socially the equal of her husband; he runs away from home. When Miss Gwilt is convicted of killing her brutal husband, ‘The judge sobbed’, which, given the many examples of hanging judges, seems the most fictional element of all. But according to
The Times,
on sentencing the guilty Miss Kent, the judge ‘was deeply affected, and spoke in accents broken by emotion’.When Miss Gwilt leaves prison, like Miss Kent she goes to a ‘first-rate establishment’ in France, then to a ‘Belgian school’ run by nuns.

These details decorate the texture of the narrative, but are not integral to it; they were nothing compared to the use Collins made of Constance Kent’s story in
The Moonstone.
There is the stained, missing nightdress; the detective, summoned from London, who fails at his task because he does not understand the upper-middle-class family, and returns to London in disgrace; Rosanna Spearman, the servant who is suspected of the crime, just as Miss Gough was; the daughter of the house who is the detective’s choice for murderer. As well as these major plot elements, Collins stuck to the Kent story in the minute elements, too. Miss Kent’s missing nightgown could be distinguished from those of her half-sisters because she alone in the house had a plain, unfrilled nightgown, a sign of her stepchild status; Rachel Verinder’s nightgown cannot be mistaken for that of the servant Rosanna Spearman, because of the frills and lace. Sergeant Cuff, like Dolly Williamson, is a rose-grower in his spare time.
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One of the local policemen in
The Moonstone
is dismissed by Cuff because he fails to follow Rosanna, as the Road police had failed to follow the mysterious person who flitted down to the scullery in the night to remove the bloody shift. Rachel Verinder, who is partly complicit in the disappearance of the moonstone, shifts suspicion to Rosanna, the way Miss Kent shifted suspicion to the laundress to whom, she said, she had given her nightdress.

At the same time, Collins turned the horrors of reality into the excitements of fiction. Readers no longer had to feel horror for the death of a toddler, viciously murdered and stuck down a privy, but could with more legitimate excitement contemplate the theft of an exotic jewel. The nightdress was stained not with blood, but with varnish from a freshly painted door. Cuff withdraws back to London after his failure, but is permitted to locate the jewel in the East End,rather than, like Whicher, being virtually forced into retirement. And while Cuff is right to believe that Rachel knows more about the crime than she is letting on, unlike Miss Kent she is proved to be a virtuous woman defending her family and her soon-to-be husband, a good woman’s role. And finally, the scientific solution to the mystery of the jewel theft, that Franklin Blake had walked in an opium-induced sleep, had not only appeared in the fiction of Forrester’s ‘A Child Found Dead’, but also in a letter to
The Times
at the time of the discovery of the Road murder, when ‘M.D.’ suggested that ‘the Frome murder may have been committed during the condition of sleep-walking, or somnambulism’. Not in Road, unfortunately, but in
The Moonstone
this was ultimately the comforting solution – it was nobody’s fault. This was the great discovery of detective fiction as a new genre: violence could be tucked away out of sight, with the murder committed offstage (or even before the story commences), and the punishment left to occur after the story ended: all the fun was in the hunt.

The story of Constance Kent appealed more to middle-class than working-class audiences. There were a few more broadsides after her confession, but because no one felt they knew why the murder had been committed, the authors appear uncertain quite what they are lamenting. Instead, it was in a seventy-part penny-dreadful,
The Boy Detective, or, The Crimes of London,
which began publication in the year Constance Kent confessed, that Ernest Keen, the eponymous boy detective, reached a working-class readership, complete with a background like Constance Kent’s. Ernest has a sister, significantly named Constance, and is driven to run away from home by his stepmother’s cruelty. He goes to sea, but after he breaks his arm ‘saving the life of a nice little girl’ he nips back for a chat with Constance, on the same night that his wicked stepmother’s secret lover, Gaspard, who is both ‘the captain of a band of brigands’ and a French aristocrat, is surprised by Mr Keen and murders him using Ernest’s knife. We now discover that between running away from home and going to sea, Ernest ‘lodged in the same house with Inspector Sharp, and did work for him so cleverly that the fly coves called him the BOY DETECTIVE!’ He is therefore well suited to gather a gang of poor but honest boys to prove his innocence while bringing the evil Gaspard and his brigands to justice. (In a particularly exciting episode, Ernest goes undercover disguised as a governess.) All this happens in the first fifty pages, before the story veers off, not only from any Constance Kent elements, but from anything that has gone before, with most of the characters vanishing without explanation.

While this narrative is deeply unsatisfying as a single volume, the central character of the boy detective was part of a new trend. Penny-bloods had earlier appealed to a broad readership; now the focus narrowed, with boys the key market. In 1861 there were nine million people under the age of nineteen, out of a population of twenty million – potentially 45 per cent of the reading public were children or young adults. This led to a raft of titles like
The Wild Boys of London
(1864–66),
The Work Girls of London
(1865) and
The Poor Boys of London
(c.1866). As with so many of these penny-dreadfuls,
The Poor Boys
is about a gang of poor but deserving boys who work with the police as their unofficial helpers. In 1860, in
The Trail of the Serpent,
Mrs Braddon had advanced her plot through Sloshy, the adopted child of a mute policeman, and in
Revelations of a Lady Detective
Mrs Paschal also uses a boy as an information-gathering device. In 1868 in
The Moonstone
Collins confirmed the transfer of the type from sensation-fiction to detective fiction with Gooseberry, ‘one of the sharpest boys in London’. Sergeant Cuff uses him to follow suspects, because boys can hang about in the streets without attracting attention: ‘The boy –
being
a boy – passed unnoticed.’ This culminated at the end of the century in Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street Irregulars: ‘half a dozen of the dirtiest and most ragged street Arabs that I ever clapped eyes on’, says the bourgeois Watson. But, replies the more pragmatic detective, ‘These youngsters. go everywhere, and hear everything.’

They did, and one of the things they liked, and had money enough to indulge in, was seeing themselves depicted onstage. Ernest Keen was transformed in productions at the Effingham and the Britannia a couple of years after the penny-dreadful was first published.
The Boy Detective
includes the same characters, and the story opens with the same unhappy Kent stepfamily set-up. Ernest and Constance run away, Ernest dresses up as a girl once more (this was clearly a favourite bit), and calls himself the Boy Detective, but while the word is used, and Ernest is at the centre of the drama, there is no detection in the script. Instead everything happens, melodrama-style, as a result of coincidence and providence. Detection and theatre had not yet meshed. It took some time for dramatists to believe that their audiences would enjoy being puzzled every bit as much as readers did. Even in 1877, Wilkie Collins’ own adaptation of
The Moonstone
had Franklin Blake walk in his sleep and steal the jewel in a trance in the opening act, although Cuff was given a greater role in solving the theft than he had in the novel. The police themselves also understood the theatrical responsibilities of their roles – the caption of one photograph, probably from 1860, states that it shows an arrest, although it is clear that the men had posed in a studio, creating for their audience an image of what their job should look like.

For suddenly, ‘detective’ plays had become fashionable. The turning point was Tom Taylor’s
The Ticket-of-LeaveMan
in 1863.
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Like the poison panic of the 1840s, and the garrotting panic in the early 1850s and 1860s, in the 1860s there was a ticket-of-leave panic, when fears became widespread that paroled convicts – men who had won their ‘ticket of leave’ – were reoffending on a colossal scale. As late as 1869, the Home Secretary was still receiving requests for more divisional detectives because of the ‘thousands upon thousands’ of criminals roaming the streets. Taylor’s play opened against this background, and achieved a remarkable success, running for 407 performances. Bob Brierly, the ticket-of-leave man, was nominally the hero, in the old melodrama stereotype of the country naíf unwittingly drawn into crime. But tastes were changing, and the main interest quite quickly became Hawkshaw, ‘the ‘cutest detective in the force’. (‘Cute’ meant acute, not sweet; ‘hawk’ had long meant a policeman, someone who pounced on his prey – Ainsworth had used it in
Rookwood
three decades earlier: ‘The hawks are upon us.’) The opening scene is set in a tea garden, where Hawkshaw appears disguised, on the track of a counterfeiter who is setting up Bob Brierly as his ‘flat’, or dupe, to pass bad notes. May, a good girl down on her luck, has become a street singer, and Bob gives her money before he is arrested by Hawkshaw.
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The next act takes place three years later. May has been faithfully waiting for Bob to be released from prison, and they plan to marry after he gets a job as a messenger at Mr Gibson’s City firm. On their wedding day, Hawkshaw appears at the office on the trail of a gang of forgers, the counterfeiters of the first act. They recognize Bob, inform Gibson that he is a ticket-of-leave man, and he is sacked. In the last act, Bob agrees to rob his ex-employer, but it is a ruse, and he has warned Hawkshaw, who arrives to arrest the forgers, while Mr Gibson is lectured by the wounded but valiant hero: ‘You see, there may be some good left in a “TICKET-OF-LEAVE-MAN” after all. [
Tableau.
Curtain.]’ Detectives were everywhere onstage. C.H. Hazlewood used the same French source as Taylor to produce
The Detective
at the Victoria; then the following year he wrote
The Mother’s Dying Child,
a melodrama enhanced by the presence of a female detective, ‘Florence Langton, Daughter of Sir Gervase, with a weakness for finding out secrets’. Here ‘female curiosity’ is comically equated with detection, and Florence bustles about saying things like, ‘There’s some mystery here. and I’m determined to fish it up,’ while indulging in that pastime of all stage detectives, disguise, appearing as nurse, a man and an Irish lad, as well as changing her frock (which fools everyone).
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This deluge of detection both altered public perception of the police and reflected a change that was coming from the streets. Now even policemen on the beat – the men with whom working-class audiences were most likely to come into conflict – were shown to have hearts of gold. In George Ellis’s
The Female Detective
at the Britannia, the hero, a squire’s noble son cheated out of his inheritance, becomes a policeman himself, and refuses a reward: ‘I did but my duty, [and] for that I am paid. if a man can’t do a kindness without expecting payment, Heaven help those who have nothing to give.’ The
reductio ad absurdum
of detective fever may have come in 1876, with a performance at the Surrey of
The Dog Detective: A Dramatic Sketch,
‘written expressly for Herr Wayho and His Celebrated Dog Bob’.