Customer Reviews

Classic Crimes

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

William Roughead's accounts of great crimes from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland and England are about the most delicious mind candy I can think of; I opened this new edition from NYRB and almost couldn't put it down. While his vocabulary and style at times go a bit overboard in terms of their purpleness, he still presents very readable and exciting accounts of some incredible crimes which still haunt the popular imagination today (such as his account of the West Port murders of Burke and Hare, the body snatchers).

Re-issuing Roughead's work is really a feather in NYRB's cap, and yet I can't help wishing they had taken more pains with this edition. (Because of this, I felt I could not really offer it the five stars it otherwise would've deserved.) The introduction by Luc Sante is interesting, but not without errors: he notes that all of the crimes excepting those of Burke and Hare "are discoveries [on the part of Roughead]"; yet Roughead himself admits that Deacon Brodie's case has been dramatized many times, and inspired Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Madeleine Smith's trial inspired a film, "Madeleine," directed by David Lean in the 1950s. Similarly, no editor seems to have taken the time to annotate some of Roughead's more bizarre (or anachronistic, or peculiarly Scottish) terms: "douce" is used repeatedly for "sweet", and "lands" (apparently a term for the highrise towers in Edinburgh) recurs often too, yet there's nary a word of explanation. This lack of editorial interference is not welcome, especially since Roughead often refers repeatedly to other writings of his which his original audience would have recognized but which remain obscure to a contemporary reader.

Still, this book is a real treasure--and, as with all NYRB books, it comes on beautiful paper and with a gorgeous cover.

Simply put, William Roughead was and is the greatest true crime writer of them all. Combining unusually supple storytelling talents with an inimitable, pawky sense of humor, he remains the best prose stylist chronicling human depravity since, well, the compilers of the King James Bible. A Scot by birth, Roughead became a Writer to the Signet at the turn of the last century, a privileged position which allowed him to attend and write up the great murder trials of his day and his favorites from Great Britain's colorfully criminous past. Almost all of his works are shamefully out of print but are well worth searching out in used book stores: both his own popular accounts and his contributions to the more formally edited "Notable British Trials" series. Henry James was one of his many besotted fans, and even the briefest sample of his work makes it obvious why true crime buffs consider him the Master. "Classic Crimes" (which includes chapters on Deacon Brodie, Burke and Hare, Madeleine Smith, Dr. Pritchard and other irresistible villains) is the best collection of his work, and I would be remiss if I did not own that my introduction to his peerless work came via Toni Morrison, who confessed her own idolatrous admiration in the New York Times Book Review some two decades ago. If you like Roughead, you'll never be able to get enough. As Luc Sante writers in his perceptive introduction to this latest reprint, Roughead repeatedly creates narratives which contain "in full that collision of placid, well-furnished pedantry with savage howling atavism" that was the keynote of his fascination with evil--and Roughead did believe in evil--people. More of his genius is avalable on display in "Twelve Scots Trials," available from Amazon. co.uk. As Roughead so eloquently put it: "Murder has a magic of its own, its peculair alchemy. Touched by that crimson wand, things base and sordid, things ugly and of ill report, are transformed into matters wondrous, weird and tragical. Dull streets become fraught with mystery, commonplace dwellings assume sinister aspects, everyone concerned, howsoever plain and ordinary, is invested with a new value and importance as the red light fall upon each."

Simply put, William Roughead was and is the greatest true crime writer of them all. Combining a supple prose style with an inimitable, pawky sense of humor, he remains the best prose stylist chronicling human depravity since, well, the authors of the King James Bible. A Scot by birth, Roughead became a Writer to the Signet, a privileged position which allowed him to attend and write up the great murder trials of his era (1870-1952). His works are shamefully out of print and are well worth searching out in used book stores: both his commercial collections and his contributions to the "Notable British Trials" series. Henry James was one of his many devoted fans and even the briefest sample of his prose makes it obvious why true-crime buffs consider him the master. "Classic Crimes"(which includes chapters on Deacon Brodie, Burke and Hare, Madeleine Smith, Dr. Pritchard, William Palmer, etc.) is the best collection of his work in print and I would be remiss if I did not mention that I owe my introduction to this peerless writer to Toni Morrison, who confessed her own idolatrous admiration in a New York Times Book Review piece more than 20 years ago. If you like his stuff you'll never be able to get enough of it. (Also worth securing are the works of Roughead's friend, the American Edmund Pearson, whose "Studies in Murder" was reprinted last last by the Ohio State University Press.) As Roughead so eloquently put it: "Murder has a magic of its own, its peculiar alchemy. Touched by that crimson wand, things base and sordid, things ugly and of ill report, are transformed into matters wondrous, weird and tragical. Dull streets become fraught with mystery, commonplace dwellings assume sinister aspects, everyone concerned, howsoever plain and ordinary, is invested with a new value and importance as the red light falls upon each."

This is a truly enjoyable read of murders and a recounting of the trials associated with them.-Roughead is an inimitable Scottish stylist and, as Luc Sante points out in the introduction, his "musical" use of abstruse Scottishisms is a joy in and of itself to read.

The only thing in literature to which one can really compare it is Sherlock Holmes-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle makes an appearance in one of these cases, btw.-I don't mean to do Roughead a disservice in this comparison-Certainly, these are as true to the actual facts as Roughead could make them (and he goes to great lengths to do so), and several of the cases remain unsolved or "Not Proven"-a verdict in Scots law with which you shall become all too familiar if you read this book. - But, the same Victorian atmospherics are present as in Doyle, the Victorian moralisms, the eerie descriptions, the bumbling Dogberries of police constables. It's actually refreshing to know that these things existed just as Doyle wrote of them....except these cases are REAL!

Of course, there's the question the contemplative reader asks himself from time to time as to why he is interested in the macabre and the details thereof.-An interesting question.-I know not the answer.-But we all are, it would seem, to one ghoulish extent or the other.

5 Macabre, Scottish Stars!

No true crime library is complete without some works by William Roughead, the Godfather of the genre. Between 1889 and 1949, Roughead attended every significant Scottish trial and wrote about many of them. (He sometimes also wrote about crimes from the century before.) Fans of "historical" true crime will especially enjoy the twelve essays collected in this volume, which is unfortunately one of the only Roughead works currently in print.

Not all these cases involve murder, but most do. Not all the cases are set in Scotland, but most are. And some of the cases, as I said above, are set in the late 1700s.

The true crime genre gets short shrift... unfairly, in my opinion. While it's okay to tell others you read best-selling mystery novels and thrillers ("false crime"?), you often get a bad reaction when telling people of your fascination with true crime. For those who think the true crime genre is nothing more than sensationalistic mass-market paperbacks, sold to capitalize on the latest high-profile crimes, this and a handful of other "literary" true crime books will forever alter that perception. There's some superlative stuff out there... you just have to dig for it.

The British dote on their criminals, and, at one remove, so do we Americans. The names of Burke and Hare or Madeleine Smith are as well-known to aficionados of true crime as Machine-gun Kelly or Ted Bundy. One reason was William Roughead, a writer to the Signet (Scotch lawyer) who around the turn of the last century wrote up many famous trials.

This selection of 12 covers nearly two centuries of mostly Scottish mayhem, at a leisurely Edwardian pace - an average of 50 pages. At that, they are merely condensations, in some cases, of the full records, sometimes also edited by Roughead, in the Famous British Trials series, which reproduce the stenographic records of the trials along with the supporting documents.

It turns out there is a serious reason for reverting back to these tales beyond the mere delectation of criminal voyeurism and of Roughead's wordy but sometimes malicious style. For an example of the latter, take this comment on the sentence given to Donald Merrett in 1928 for forgery, after he got away with - in Roughead's opinion - murdering his mother:

"The convict served his time (12 months) not in some grim, black cell underneath the frowning bastard battlements of the old Calton jail, but under the modern conditions obtaining in His Majesty's new prison at Saughton, a sort of penal garden city, affording in its humane and hygienic regime the advantages of a rest-cure in a criminous nursing home, and combining agreeable punishment with amusement."

Today, more likely, since Merrett was 17 when he shot his mum in the back of the head, he would never see the inside of a British lockup.

The meaty historical point, though, is that British justice was wayward. Most of the 10 cases resulted in Roughead's estimation in wrong verdicts. Either the fair poisoner, like Smith, got off; or an innocent man, like Oscar Slater, spent 30 years in prison.

Other critics, like the communist Claude Cockburn, writing at the same time as Roughead, have condemned British justice, usually for its class-based prejudices. Roughead does not openly condemn, and he only occasionally makes a remark referring to class; but his implicit judgments are the more persuasive for all that.

In some of the Scotch trials, he relates, lawyerly or press opinion stated that such a verdict (sometimes even an indictment) would "never happen in an English court." But, as Cockburn showed, justice was not blind among the Sassenachs either.

Part of the problem was, and is, that British judges more or less instruct the jury what verdict to bring in, something American judges are not allowed to do.

Even if you are not concerned with miscarriages of justice in the United Kingdom, some of the events described by Roughead are eye-opening.

Until far into the 19th century, Scottish courts were not allowed to adjourn once the jury was empaneled. Trials were conducted around the clock, sometimes for as long as four days, and the jurors must have been stupefied by the time of the final arguments.

Even when a more sensible mode of conduct was employed, jurors may well have been stupefied. Roughead, as a lawyer, is very fond of a long, complex, eloquent final argument. Some of these lasted as long as 14 hours - something else unlikely in an American criminal trial.

Presumably Scottish jurors condemned to endless sermons on hard benches in freezing kirk or chapel thought it not unusual.

I find many of the reviews "right on".

However, many comments are off-base, and as His Cousin, I find inappropriate. Ask, and you may find Truth!

"No disrespect..." ..."but"... there is that word again... don't listen to what I just said, just what I am about to say...

Amazing how the critics, nearly a Century later, have criticisms that sting, but couldn't find the gumption to face Him... or me!

Let's get it on!