Crime-Book Society paperback edition - 1936?
I thought I was sitting down to another Sidney Horler rattling yarn, but was instead confronted by seventeen non-fiction shortish articles. No matter, as most of them were quite interesting. The majority dealt with cases set in 19th century Britain and were a mixture of murder cases and pecuniary dishonesty. The shortest - Dawson, The Rosy-faced Horse-Poisoner and Why Walter Watts Hanged Himself - were a mere seven pages; whilst the longest - Messalina and the Corset Salesman, The Snyder-Gray Sex-Murder Drama took fifty pages.
I rather took to The Abominable Madame Rachel, the subject of the first chapter. Born about 1806 and too ignorant to write her own name, she was sufficiently clever to extract thousands of pounds from other women who were either not content with the quota of beauty with which Providence had endowed them, or sought by artificial means to restore that which, in the ordinary course of time, had diminished. In 1863, she published a pamphlet of 24 pages, entitled 'Beautiful for Ever', in which she extolled the extraordinary properties of Magnetic Dew of Sahara and the Jordan Water'. She had apparently purchased the exclusive rights from the Government of Morocco. An officer's widow, Mrs. Borradaile, was successfully swindled out of over £5,000 over a period of years. Eventually Madame Rachel was prosecuted for conspiracy to defraud and tried at the Old Bailey in 1868. It took two trials before she was sentenced to penal servitude; after serving for four years she was liberated on a ticket-of-leave - to commit the same fraud again. This time she practised as the 'Arabian Perfumer to the queen'. Back she came to the Old Bailey in 1878. Sentenced to five year's penal servitude, she succumbed to an attack of dropsy and died in the infirmary of Woking Convict Prison in 1880. What a character!
Last of the "Resurrectionists" dealt with a little-known 'Burke and Hare' type body-snatchers in London in 1831. Prior to 1832, the only bodies legally available in England for dissection were those of criminals hanged for murder. The consequence was that the supply of 'subjects' was wholly inadequate for the requirements of surgeons. Large sums were accordingly paid for dead bodies - hence the ghouls. This tale involved three such men and a Lincolnshire boy of 14 - found to have been clearly murdered for the purpose. Amazingly, the signed statement of one of the men, John Bishop, said he had made a livelihood as a body-snatcher for 12 years, and had obtained and sold from 500 to 1,000 bodies. How did he sleep at night?
Other stories, such as that of The Reverend William Dodd dealt with forgery and general felony (Dodd was hanged in 1777 for forgery); Leopold Redpath sentenced to be transported beyond the seas for the term of your natural life in 1857; the M.P. for Lambeth, William Roupell, who forged his father's will and, in 1862, was sentenced to penal servitude for life, but was released on a ticket-of-leave after 20 years of penance; all are told with zest by Sidney Horler. The author appears to have ransacked old newspaper accounts and law courts' trials for his collection. No doubt this also helped him construct his own fictional tales.
Perhaps a more famous case (thanks nowadays to Kate Summerscale's 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher and the subsequent ITV film of 2011) involved the murder of a nearly four-year-old infant at Rode Hill House in Wiltshire in 1860. Only five years later, did the child's teenage sister (as she was then) confess to the deed. Although Constance Kent was sentenced to be hanged, she was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life, and then released after 20 years' confinement. She emigrated to Australia and lived to the grand age of 100! And they say murder doesn't pay.
Most of the stories are set in the 19th century, but two are set less than a decade before Horler's own collection. The splendidly-named Messalina and the Corset Salesman...chapter addressed a murder in a suburb of New York on 20th March 1927. Albert Snyder was the Art Editor of the Hearst Sports Magazine called Motor Boating. Held in the highest esteem by his colleagues, it was his misfortune to have married an attractive blonde, Ruth, who became known afterwards as "The Granite Woman". In 50 pages, Horler constructs the time-line and motives for Albert's murder in what he calls this triangle of sex. Henry Judd Gray a diminutive traveller in corsets was arraigned with Ruth for the crime and both were executed in Sing-Sing's Electric Chair. It was a drama of the middle-classes - a tragedy worked out amid the quietude of peace-loving suburbia. What at first sight appeared to be a burglary gone wrong, with Ruth tied up upstairs soon proved, by too many unlikelihoods, to be a tissue of lies. She said she had been knocked out, but no bruise or lump was found on her head; valuable silver and jewellery had been left untouched. None of her articles had been disarranged, unlike her dead husband's. An illicit love affair was established between Ruth and Judd Gray; the latter had a seemingly cast-iron alibi for being far from the scene. However, a railway ticket found in a waste paper basket in his hotel room proved otherwise. Eventually, they both confessed and suffered the extreme penalty. A reporter smuggled a tiny camera attached to his leg into the Death House and actually took a photograph of Ruth whilst she was being electrocuted. It is on the internet and I have seen it. Ugh.
Crab-Apple Tree Murders, the second longest and final story in Horler's collection, occurred twelve years' earlier, in September 1922, on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The bodies of Rev. Dr. Edward W. Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills, with whom it was known he was carrying on an affair, were found lying side by side beneath a crab-apple tree in a deserted lane well known as a trysting-place for lovers. His wife of eleven years, Frances, was connected with a very rich and powerful family in New Jersey. An ageing spinster, she had leapt at the chance of marriage to this attractive man. He had married for position and luxuries, not love. A young girl, extremely attractive and married to an uncouth husband, James Mills, was in the choir of Edward Hall's Church of St. John the Evangelist. Two and two did make four. They began an affair. After the murder, detectives quickly cast their net over the widowed Eleanor Hall and her brothers. Henry Hewgill and William Carpenter Mills. Although a witness, named Jane Gibson, swore she had witnessed the murder scene and testified in court that Eleanor was there, the three wealthy defendants got off. The "Billion-Dollar Defence" had triumphed. At the time of Horler's publication he could write - there are some people in America who still believe that, one day, this dark sinister secret will be solved.
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