My Experiences at Scotland Yard
by . New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923. 8vo. x + 359 pp. $2.50.
SIR BASIL THOMSON was the head of the British Secret Service during the war. Incidentally he was also in charge of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation at Scotland Yard, and in this capacity was responsible for the work of the detective service in the London metropolitan police district. His book is a chronicle of the exciting cases which came before him, in one jurisdiction or the other, during the war years and immediately thereafter. It is not a series of detective stories in the ordinary sense; on the contrary, the outstanding impression one gets from Sir Basil’s narrative is that most detective stories are humbug, so far are they removed from anything in the real processes of criminal investigation. Good detective work, as he proves both by argument and example, is the outcome of thorough organization and sustained work, with a dash of luck thrown in. What would Mr. Sherlock Holmes have done in a London murder case where the only clue to the identity of the victim was one small laundry-mark on a piece of underclothing? Scotland Yard in this instance had an investigator at work within two hours at every laundry throughout the London police area, and in time one of them got the right clue. The murderer was then found, convicted and executed. So with the many other examples of prompt and effective work which Sir Basil gives. Individual shrewdness had little to do with any of them.
Most of the chapters are concerned with spies, of whom there was an endless variety. They included both men and women, enemies and neutrals, persons of almost every vocation. Nevertheless, the methods which they used were strangely alike. The Germans maintained at Antwerp a regular school of espionage in which novitiates were coached for their dangerous work and sent into the Allied countries by the score; but the technique was crude and few of these supersleuths were able to get very far. Women, as a rule, failed to make good in the spy business.
On the outbreak of the war the British police immediately arrested every known German spy in the realm, about a score of them in all. For the moment this action demoralized the machinery of secret communication with Berlin and curtained the transporting of the First British Army to France; but in due course the Germans managed to build it up again. There were some spies who did their work with rare cleverness, and others whose crass stupidity soon landed them in the police dragnet. England, as Sir Basil shows, went spy-mad in the early months of the war and thousands of harmless individuals were denounced to the police on the flimsiest pretexts. Nine out of every ten among them were turned loose after a brief interview.
Several chapters of the book deal with things which a rigid censorship precluded from reaching the ears of the world at the time of their occurrence. The tragic story of Sir Roger Casement’s intrigues with the German authorities is fully and fairly narrated. An extraordinary case it was, as Sir Basil explains it, with some psychiatric phases. Another strange episode is vividly recounted in the chapter on ‘The Bogus Armistice,’and no more astounding tale has ever been written than that of Trebitsch, the Hungarian Jew, who was in turn a clergyman, a journalist, a member of the British Parliament, and a German spy — still in the land of the living, and when last heard from serving as a propaganda agent for various monarchical organizations in Berlin.
The entire book is interesting, amusing, enlightening. Its author has an all-pervading sense of humor which crops out on every page. He writes informally and with rare self-effacement. There is hardly a dull paragraph in any of his chapters.
WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO.