Classic Crimes

"William Roughead technically pre-dates Pearson. He began writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he struck up a correspondence and friendship with Pearson after the publication of Studies in Murder in 1924. Roughead was a Scottish lawyer. He started out as what you’d call an amateur criminologist. He edited a notable British trial series, and he himself attended most of the significant trials that happened in Scotland during his lifetime. I picked that particular book because it collects some of his best stories and also because it’s still in print, so I thought it would be the easiest for people to get a hold of, which I heartily recommend! Ornate. He’s a friend of Henry James, and some have said he has a Jamesian style. To me, he’s more reminiscent of Henry Fielding. He’s an extremely intrusive narrator. He’s quite happy to go on digressions, and he uses involved, sometimes archaic language. He’s interested in pinning down as much as he can figure out about the people as people, the personalities involved in the stories. You definitely have a sense of his presence in the work as someone showing you or telling you the story. You can imagine being in front of a fireplace and hearing a slightly longwinded, but really riveting tale. I’d say the latter. He was interested in the subject long before he started writing for commercial publication. He and Pearson share a correspondence, which is, as befits them, very entertaining. They’re both quite urbane characters. They are also dismissive of what they see as more of the lowbrow true crime writers. They mention a few contemporaries of theirs a bit snidely. That’s right. It’s not a coincidence that one of the writers they disparage is a woman. They clearly view Lizzie Borden as an intriguing and titillating figure. Roughead refers to Pearson’s “attaching tale of the incomparable Lizzie Borden”, and says to him in a letter at one point, “if I were a bachelor, instead of a bald-headed father of four, I should visit Fall River and pay my addresses to the attaching Miss Lizzie, on the chance of getting something out of her regarding the case in the privacy of domestic life.” I remember being surprised while reading Iphigenia in Forest Hills by a scene in which she’s visiting the victim’s family at their home—I don’t know if it struck you as well, but I’d forgotten it the first time around. The kids pop in from the periphery, and Malcolm’s trying to figure out what the kids might say, and she puts her arm casually around one of them. Entirely natural gesture, but somehow inconsistent with her authoritative persona. I read it and thought, ‘Oh my god. Janet Malcolm just put her arm around a kid!’ That’s, of course, the serious intervention in the story and demonstrates just how unbalanced she found the guardian. It also struck me, reading it again, that the guardian’s crazy beliefs are more mainstream now, which is horrifying. The list of things that are clearly an indication that he’s not a rational thinker are things that unfortunately one can find quite easily on the internet these days. Yes. Perhaps Pearson is onto something when he says that there’s something about the subject matter that just interests people and the sensationalized, breathless approach will draw the eye. Yet there was also an audience for tales told in a more leisurely and careful manner. Pearson and Roughead were professional men of learning who sought tell the stories accurately and artfully. Their background is part of their calling card. “Pearson and Roughead were professional men of learning who sought tell the stories accurately and artfully” They’re also standing in opposition to very schematic, nineteenth-century views of criminality, where it wouldn’t have been that difficult to fathom why someone did something because criminals had ‘a type.’ According to the influential criminologist Cesare Lombroso, you could see the signs of criminality in someone’s face. Pearson actually makes a lot of fun of that notion. In The Instigation of the Devil , he includes, among his studies of crimes, a few lighter essays like “Rules for Murderesses”, “What Makes a Good Murder?” and “What Does a Murderer Look Like?” He points out that many of the same features that are supposed to be indicative of the criminal type are equally visible in undergraduates at Cambridge and Oxford. That’s a good question! I suppose it could be either. But I think he intended to mock the notion of a biological type as an outdated view —in other words, that was the idea of a benighted era, and now of course we’re much smarter. Pearson is intrigued by individual psychological understandings; he’s right at the beginning of the psychoanalytic era. They do have that in common. Some of these cases, you would think, could be easily resolved with techniques of forensic analysis we have now. But I’d hesitate to say that, because these books highlight cases hinging on whether a jury can believe that the defendant was capable of the crime—not so much the mechanics of it. That’s very clearly what’s going on with Lizzie Borden, but to a certain extent that’s at play in any trial. We say there’s evidence linking a person to a crime, even proving that the accused must be involved—but do we really think that person could have done it?"