Villainy Detected

“IN England,” writes Lillian de la Torre in the introduction to this anthology, “the years from 1660 to 1800 were one long festival of crime.” She then proves the claim with as staggering a collection of rogues, domestic murderers, and judicial atrocities as the reader can find anywhere.

The only criterion which Miss de la Torre appears to have considered in selecting her pieces “by various hands” is the very sound one of interest. The tales include piracy, highway robbery, lawsuits over inheritances, two inexplicable disappearances, and the expected thefts and assassinations. The authors range from such modern connoisseurs of crime as Edmund Pearson and William Roughead to Daniel Defoe and an anonymous eighteenth-century ballad writer whose style, in describing the liquidation of Mr. Hays by his spouse, suggests an ancestor of W. S. Gilbert.

Villainy Detected is hardly a book to read straight through, and every reader will develop preferences among the disreputable creatures who fill its pages, but anyone who has a taste for bizarre misdeeds will want to see it. My own affection centers on the ghost of Sergeant Davies, which besought an addle-witted Highland lad to bury its murdered owner’s bones. The ghost spoke, according to the Highlander, “as good Gaelic as ever he heard in Lochaber,”although the late sergeant was an Englishman who knew not one word of the local tongue while alive. But he is run a close second by one Perry, on whose confession three people were hanged for the murder of a man who wasn’t dead. This affair occurred in Gloucestershire, in 1662, and one can only assume that the excitement of the Stuart restoration had made the authorities more careless than usual about the presence of a corpus delicti.

Much of the charm of these antique disasters depends upon the police methods of the day. Detective work as we know it was unheard of, and the prosecution of any crime depended largely upon the energy and indignation of the victim or his surviving relatives. The situation gave the criminal a sporting chance, permitting a gentleman highwayman the leisure to collect his lordship’s watch with an elegance and civility now unhappily lost to the profession.

It is worth noting that few of the professional rascals whose exploits are recounted here seem to have been driven into crime by anything except a desire for more money and less work. Lieutenant Richardson, correctly described as the “amorous pirate,” was a lad with talent only for feminine conquests, but Jack Sheppard, burglar and most miraculous jail-breaker, was a first-rate carpenter, and James Maclaine a not unsuccessful grocer.

Miss de la Torre, who recently published a reconstruction of the Canning case under the title Elizabeth Is Missing, has naturally included Pearson’s account of this perennial puzzler. For good measure, she has tossed in one of her own short stories on the same subject, a speculation in which the question of what happened to poor Lizzie, and why, is solved by “Dr. Sam: Johnson,” James Boswell assisting. It is the one frankly fictional item in the book, and it bears up very well among the more solid pieces.

The introductions to the various chapters by Miss de la Torre are exceedingly pleasant reading, setting the stage with wit and an occasional undertone of parody. Altogether, this “Collection of the most sensational True Crimes and the most notorious Real Criminals that blotted the name of Britain” is a matter to delight the judicious lover of authentic wickedness.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS