The Islington Mystery

The public taste in murders is often erratic, and sometimes, I think,
fallible enough. Take, for example, that Crippen business. It happened
seventeen years ago, and it is still freshly remembered and discussed
with interest. Yet it was by no means a murder of the first rank. What
was there in it? The outline is crude enough; simple, easy, and
disgusting, as Dr. Johnson observed of another work of art. Crippen was
cursed with a nagging wife of unpleasant habits; and he cherished a
passion for his typist. Whereupon he poisoned Mrs. Crippen, cut her up
and buried the pieces in the coal-cellar. This was well enough, though
elementary; and if the foolish little man had been content to lie quiet
and do nothing, he might have lived and died peaceably. But he must
needs disappear from his house--the action of a fool--and cross the
Atlantic with his typist absurdly and obviously disguised as a boy:
sheer, bungling imbecility. Here, surely, there is no single trace of
the master's hand; and yet, as I say, the Crippen Murder is reckoned
amongst the masterpieces. It is the same tale in all the arts: the low
comedian was always sure of a laugh if he cared to tumble over a pin;
and the weakest murderer is sure of a certain amount of respectful
attention if he will take the trouble to dismember his subject. And
then, with respect to Crippen: he was caught by means of the wireless
device, then in its early stages. This, of course, was utterly
irrelevant to the true issue; but the public wallows in irrelevance. A
great art critic may praise a great picture, and make his criticism a
masterpiece in itself. He will be unread; but let some asinine
paragraphist say that the painter always sings "Tom Bowling" as he sets
his palette, and dines on boiled fowl and apricot sauce three times a
week--then the world will proclaim the artist great.





II


The success of the second-rate is deplorable in itself; but it is more
deplorable in that it very often obscures the genuine masterpiece. If
the crowd runs after the false, it must neglect the true. The
intolerable _Romola_ is praised; the admirable _Cloister and the Hearth_
is waived aside. So, while the very indifferent and clumsy performance
of Crippen filled the papers, the extraordinary Battersea Murder was
served with a scanty paragraph or two in obscure corners of the Press.
Indeed, we were so shamefully starved of detail that I only retain a
bare outline of this superb crime in my memory; but, roughly, the affair
was shaped as follows: In the first floor of one of the smaller sets of
flats in Battersea a young fellow (? 18--20) was talking to an actress,
a "touring" actress of no particular fame, whose age, if I recollect,
was drawing on from thirty to forty. A shot, a near shot, broke in
suddenly on their talk. The young man dashed out of the flat, down the
stairs, and there, in the entry of the flats, found his own father, shot
dead. The father, it should be remarked, was a touring actor, and an old
friend of the lady upstairs. But here comes the magistral element in
this murder. Beside the dead man, or in the hand of the dead man, or in
a pocket of the dead man's coat--I am not sure how it was--there was
found a weapon made of heavy wire--a vile and most deadly contraption,
fashioned with curious and malignant ingenuity. It was night-time, but
the bright light of a moon ten days old was shining, and the young man
said he saw someone running and leaping over walls.