In claiming to have solved a real-life murder mystery, PD James is in distinguished company. Don your deerstalker and join us on the trail of other literary detectives
Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842)
The boozy progenitor of all detective fiction also inaugurated the "solving" of real cases by crime writers – at least in fiction. A year after shop assistant Mary Rogers's body was found floating in the Hudson river, Poe transposed the unsolved case to Paris and set his detective Auguste Dupin to work on it. However, news of a confession apparently explaining Rogers's death (suggesting a botched abortion) broke during the serialisation in Snowden's Ladies' Companion, forcing him to rewrite.
Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji case (1907)
After spending three years in jail for supposedly carrying out brutal attacks on farm animals and writing threatening letters, solicitor Edalji (by then unable to practise) wrote asking for help in clearing his name. Conan Doyle's resulting press campaign made the arguments in favour of the court of criminal appeal – founded in the same year – irresistible, and almost a century later inspired Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George.
Francis Iles, Was Crippen a Murderer? (1934)
A member, like Sayers and Agatha Christie, of the Detection Club, Iles had already drawn on the case of Dr Crippen – hanged for poisoning his wife, Cora, in 1910 – in his best-known novel Malice Aforethought. In his essay he argued the American homeopathic physician was guilty only of manslaughter, having intended just to drug Cora long enough for him to escape and visit his mistress. Iles also wrote about other crimes, notably the 30s love-triangle tragedy known as the Rattenbury case and the Wallace murder.
Dorothy L Sayers, The Murder of Julia Wallace (1937)
In a sensational trial in 1931, William Wallace was convicted of murdering his wife Julia; he claimed, however, that he had discovered her body on returning home after a fool's errand – following up a phone call from a ''Mr Qualtrough" asking him to visit a non-existent Liverpool address – and was acquitted on appeal. Sayers's verdict? The onus is on "those who prefer a more out-of-the-way solution to the obvious one" to identify a convincing alternative killer.
Michael Dibdin, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978)
Among the most outlandish examples of theorising about true crime, Dibdin's Conan Doyle pastiche offers a solution – as many other authors and screenwriters had done, in fiction and non-fiction, and as Patricia Cornwell would do later – to the elusive identity of Jack the Ripper. His ending, though, asks us to believe that the original serial killer was someone previously thought to be a fictional character.
James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia (1987)
Ellroy's novel follows LAPD cops investigating the grotesque and still-unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short (nicknamed the Black Dahlia by the press, largely because she wore a black suit), one of whom eventually links the crime, in classic Chandler-esque fashion, to a wealthy local family. Nine years later, Ellroy investigated his mother Geneva's murder in 1958 (when he was 10) in the non-fiction book My Dark Places.
Ian Rankin, Black and Blue (1997)
Still seen as the best of Rankin's Rebus books, this multi-stranded novel includes a storyline about the real-life, uncaught 60s Glasgow serial murderer dubbed Bible John, who re-emerges to pursue a (fictional) copycat killer called Johnny Bible. Whether Rankin offers a solution is debatable, but his detective eventually realises that someone he has met in his travels – by no means the most obvious figure – is Bible John.
Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer (2002)
Cornwell switched to non-fiction to set out her theory that the painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, after a lengthy and vastly expensive research process that included buying up several Sickert paintings. Ripperologists and art experts were both unimpressed (and no-one liked her arrogant subtitle, Case Closed), while crime-writing fans noted that the eccentric project coincided with Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series starting to lose the plot.
Stieg Larsson, Men Who Hate Women, AKA The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
The killing of prostitute Catrine da Costa in 1984 in Stockholm has been called "the real-life murder that inspired Stieg Larsson". His response was not to try to solve the case, either in fiction or non-fiction, but to begin his trilogy with a novel centring on violence against women, in which two respectable figures – Lisbeth Salander's legal guardian and a businessman – turn out to be misogynistic monsters. This arguably invited Swedes to read that back into the Da Costa murder, for which the prime suspects were both doctors.
PD James, Julia Wallace case (2013)
After using the case in two novels, James reviews the evidence in her Sunday Times article, and concludes the "obvious" solution – the husband's guilt – is the right one. She argues the "Qualtrough" phone call was a prank (not to get Wallace out of the house) by Richard Parry, the other chief suspect, thereby weakening the case against Parry.
0 comments:
Post a Comment