UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Edmund Pearson, Studies in Murder (1924)

            Pearson’s important contribution to the genre of True Crime recounts what was known in 1924 of five murder cases, using court records, newspaper accounts, and other nonfiction sources to recreate crimes and subsequent trials from 1812 to 1904.

            Pearson spends the most time with the Borden case: the trail and acquittal of Lizzie Borden for the ax murder of her father Andrew Borden and her mother Abby on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. The jury took only an hour and a half to acquit her. Although she made conflicting and implausible statements about where she was during the killings, she was probably acquitted because of the lack of physical evidence, especially no proved murder weapon and no blood on her clothes seen by anyone who encountered her shortly after the murders.

            Then he takes up “The Twenty-third Street Murder” of Benjamin Nathan, a rich Manhattan stockbroker who was bludgeoned to death in 1870. No one was tried for Nathan’s murder, though his playboy son Washington Nathan was suspected. Later reports from convicts pointed toward a robbery planned by several people.

            There was a conviction in the 1896 killings aboard the barkentine Herbert Fuller of the captain, his wife, and the second officer. The first mate, Thomas Bram, was convicted, retried, and convicted again, serving fifteen years for the murders.

            In the last two cases Pearson treats, Charles Tucker was electrocuted for the 1904 murder of Mabel Page in Weston, Vermont, and Stephen Boorns was about to be executed for the murder of his brother-in-law Russell Colvin when Russell Colvin was found and brought to the court in Manchester, Vermont, where the murder was supposed to have taken place.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: William Roughead, Classic Crimes (1951)

            Mystery writers were inspired by true crime stories, and one of the best chroniclers in that line was William Roughead. Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and student of crime. If he didn’t invent the True Crime genre, he certainly helped make it popular in books starting with his 1906 account of the trial of Pritchard the poisoner. His friends included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he worked to clear Oscar Slater, Henry James, who enjoyed Roughead’s true crime narratives, and Edmund Lester Pearson, whose 1924 Studies in Murder, with its centerpiece the Lizzy Borden case, also helped to make true crime a popular literary genre.

            This is a summary of a dozen of the crimes that Roughead treats at length in his various books. One is the case of Oscar Slater, wrongfully convicted of a murder that took place in late 1908, who served nineteen years of a life sentence that had already been commuted from a death sentence. Slater’s was one of two cases in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle interested himself, and Doyle committed himself for the first ₤1,000 of the expenses for legal redress for Slater, who was released in 1927 and whose conviction was overturned in 1928. The case had been bungled from the beginning, with many false eyewitness identifications coached by the police, the prosecutor’s absurd mistaken argument that a small tack hammer in Slater’s possession was the murder weapon when photographs and the opinion of the first doctor who examined the victim indicated that a chair was used (the doctor was not called at the trial), and other notorious gaffes, but the telling point in the dismissal was the outrageous bias shown by the presiding judge.

            Roughead’s first book in 1906 was about the 1865 trial of Dr. Pritchard the poisoner, and he gives a summary of the case here. Pritchard was tried for poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, but he seems to have dabbled in other methods earlier. He almost surely killed and then burned the corpse of a servant girl in her bed in a top floor room in his house in 1863. The girl was perhaps less tractable than the one he hired and seduced right after the death of the first servant. Of this liaison Mrs. Pritchard apparently knew, and she allowed it to continue. The defense at Pritchard’s trial attempted to put the blame on his servant/mistress, but unsuccessfully. Pritchard’s hanging in July 1865 was the last public execution in Glasgow.

            “To Meet Miss Madeleine Smith” describes an especially sensational case, concerning a young woman who apparently poisoned her lover Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a clerk considerably below her social standing. When her parents arranged a marriage for her with a prosperous Glasgow merchant, Smith tried to break off her affair. L’Angelier refused and threated to make her explicit letters public. She bought arsenic on at least two occasions, and he died of arsenic poisoning, but no one saw them together in the days leading up to his death, and the 15-man jury returned the distinctly Scotch verdict of “Not Proven.” The year was 1857, the poisoning took place in Glasgow, and the trial was in Edinburgh.

            The Sandyford Murder in July, 1862 was a notorious case in which a servant girl was killed with a cleaver. The murderer was certainly the landlord, James Fleming, but a friend of the murdered girl, Jessie McLachlan, was convicted on Fleming’s evidence as witness for the prosecution, a circumstance that in Scotland sheltered him from being accused of the crime himself.

            A dry sense of humor, a pleasantly old-fashioned style to fit these cases out of the dusty annals of the law, and a salting of Scots phrases all enliven this material, which is sensational enough to begin with.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase (1908)

            Fortyish spinster Rachel Innes has taken a house in the country for the summer, and goes there with her nervous maid Liddy, who, “with a face as long as the moral law,” is “never so happy as when she is making herself wretched.” Intrusions and alarums happen even before the arrival of Rachel’s nephew Halsey and niece Gertrude, whom Rachel has raised ever since the death of her sister, when the children were small. Halsey is in love with the daughter of the landlord of the house, and the landlord’s son is soon murdered, shot from the circular staircase during one of the many nightly ruckuses. Gertrude is in love with the cashier of the landlord’s bank, which soon fails, with the blame falling on the young cashier.

            Rachel helps the detective, Jameson, to work out the mystery, being the one who interviews the dying cook, and also the one who finds the secret room in the house. The slow-moving plot, and its many intricacies, mar the book, but it shows up on many lists of classic mysteries and is remembered as the prime exemplar of the Had-I-But-Known school of mystery fiction, where the narrator often uses some variation of that phrase to foreshadow later plot developments.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Blanche on the Lam, by Barbara Neely (1992)

             Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam, published by Penguin in 1992, is unusual partly because of its detective, a plump, 40-year-old, gap-toothed black woman.  Her name is Blanche White, and she’s very aware of her name’s double irony.  She cleans houses and cooks for white folks, sometimes as a temp.  She goes on the lam, walking out of the courthouse bathroom and a thirty-day sentence for writing a bad check.  In order to get out of town and away from the cops, she takes a temp job in the country house of Everett and Grace--I'm not sure we ever learn their last name-- and their Down-syndrome cousin Mumsfield, who befriends Blanche.

            The setting is rural North Carolina, and the mystery concerns a struggle for control of an aging, supposedly drunken aunt of Mumsfield.  Rich Aunt Emmeline is the target of plots to get her money, and the plots involve an impostor, a handyman who is later murdered, and an unwilling Blanche.  At first Blanche does not understand why Mumsfield's descriptions of his wonderful aunt don't tally with her knowledge of the mean drunk upstairs.  Eventually she works it out, but not before a number of adventures, including Blanche’s use of a two-by-four to coldcock Grace, who's chasing her with a knife.

            Of more interest than the plot is what Barbara Neely does with her detective:  a live-in maid who cleans house is in a unique position to know everything that goes on in a household.  If she’s observant and smart, like Blanche, she can have all the family’s secrets figured out in a matter of days.  “Reading people and signs, and sizing up situations,” the author writes of her main character, “were as much a part of her work as scrubbing floors and making beds.”  Even more advantages attach to this character when she’s in the house of a rich, bigoted southern family:  as a poor black woman, Blanche is nearly invisible to Everett and Grace unless they want something to eat, something to drink, or something to be vacuumed.

            The charm of Blanche is her complete vulnerable ordinariness.  She works hard for a living, taking care of her dead sister’s two children, with some help from her own mother.  Blanche was teased as a child until her cousin convinced her that she was a Night Girl who could become invisible just by slipping out into the dark.  Blanch used this in her youth, eavesdropping, discovering things and making her mother think she had second sight.  Her detective skills are a by-product of her survival skills.

            Blanche on the Lam is the first of a series Barbara Neely has written about her detective Blanche White.  It won several awards for best first mystery novel, and I think you’ll like it.