A Leak In The Safe

 

People like to argue as to when crime fiction first started. To me the mystery is not a fairly recent off shoot of "real" literature, but a mighty redwood in and of itself, and one whose roots anchor it at the very beginning of the popular literature and the English novel. Public executions were very popular and frequent in early modern England, and one of the first viable commercial uses for the printing press was the publication of broadsides now known as gallows literature, which were sensational eyewitness accounts of the hanging and the confession the criminal made on the scaffold. As early as 1563 these single sheets were being printed and distributed either at or soon after the execution.

Obviously timeliness was a factor – with so many executions, the hot villain of today could quickly become passe. It wasn’t always so easy to get a criminal’s confession either, so, naturally enough, printers began to fabricate them. This could cause some problems, as in the case of one Mrs. Windsor, a "baby farmer" accused of the barbarous murder of Mary Jane Harris’s child. A baby farmer was a woman who would look after another’s infant, in many cases an illegitimate one, so that the mother could continue earning her livelihood, often as a prostitute or maid. As the broadside says, Mrs. Windsor had a stern means of foreclosure when the payment stopped coming in:

Those children belong to some poor girl

That had been led astray

Mrs. Windsor would take them to nurse

As long as they would pay.

She would murder them – yes, strangle them

For this paltry gain,

By putting them between beds

Or pressing the jugular vein.

In its description of the execution itself the broadside goes on to say that "when culprit and hangman stood side by side a fearful yell rose from the assembled crowd, and the excitement only ceased when the culprit, who struggled but little, ceased to exist." The only problem with this graphic account is that Mrs. Windsor was granted mercy and sentenced to penal servitude, which makes it clear that a very powerful fictive imagination was at work here.

Another way crime fiction masquerading as fact was promulgate was in the chapbook, bound, folded sheets which allowed the account to be somewhat more extensive, as in the eight page one entitled The History of John Gregg and his Family of Robbers and murderers. As Ian Maxted describes it, the book:

…reports how the Gregg family took up their abode in a cave near Clovelly on the north coast of Devon where they lived twenty-five years without visiting any town or city. During this time they robbed above one thousand persons, and ate the corpses of all those whom they robbed. They were eventually discovered and the king himself came with 400 men to hunt them out. Their cave was discovered containing "such a multitude of arms, legs, thighs, hands and feet, of men, women and children hung up in rows, like dry’d beef and a great many lying in pickle." John’s charming family, consisting of his wife, eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grand-sons and fourteen grand-daughters begotten by incest were taken to Exeter and next day conducted under a strong guard to Plymouth where they were executed without trial.

It this weren’t self evidently a complete fabrication, it’s also suspiciously similar to another chapbook called The Legend of Sawney Beane: A General, True History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Famous Highwayman by Captain Charles Johnson. It certainly strengthens my argument as to the deep roots of crime fiction to disclose that Captain Charles Johnson was a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, a man generally considered the first English novelist. One his most notable (and enjoyable) works is Moll Flanders, the alleged confessions of a woman of the demimonde who lived by her wits in the early eighteenth century. Henry Fielding, the first English novelist who admitted he wrote fiction also produced a faux confession called The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great Infamous Highwayman.

Kind of makes you laugh when you hear the swells say that crime fiction is a new genre that has nothing to do with the "real literature," don’t it?

YR PAL,

UBU