It was a liaison punctuated by violent quarrels and doubtful reconciliations

I came across A Companion to Murder: An A-Z of Notorious Killers and Sensational Trials (1900-1950) by Edward Spencer Shew because the most recent edition has a forward by Theodore Dalrymple, a writer whom I admire. Dalrymple comments:

Between his excursions into fiction, Edward Spencer Shew wrote two classic books, A Companion to Murder, published in 1960, and A Second Companion to Murder, published in 1961. The first of these books won an Edgar Award in 1963, one of the prestigious prizes awarded annually by the Mystery Writers of America. But I think it fair to say that, brilliant and entertaining as these books are, they are nowadays known only to a small group of aficionados.

I have never met anyone, however, who has read them who did not become a devotee and an admirer of their author.

They do not pretend to be encyclopaedias of murders committed in Britain between 1900 and 1950, but rather compendia of the most interesting cases. The period chosen includes the apogee and then decline of what might be called the golden age of British murder, that is to say of murder committed not just in that sordid underworld that has always existed, and in which murder is only to be expected, but of murder committed in a respectable and religious middle or lower-middle class environment, where murders were not just a matter of ‘two blockheads to kill and be killed', as De Quincey put in his essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

Spencer Shew wrote at the end of what might be called the cosy era of crime in Britain, during which violence had fallen to the lowest levels in history and therefore might be read about in comfort as something exotic and mildly titillating.

[snip]

Such murders can be committed only where respectability retains its hold as a desideratum on the great mass of the population, and Spencer Shew chronicled, through its crime, the end of the era of respectability. His book is therefore valuable as social history; but if he was fortunate in his period, his period was fortunate in him.

His vignettes of the murders, murderers, victims, trials, defence and prosecution barristers, and judges (who were all household names in their day, as are stars of television programmes now), are masterpieces of compression, conveying atmosphere, character and event in few but brilliantly-chosen words.

Here, for example, are the first words of his description of the infamous ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer, George Joseph Smith, who pretended to marry three women in succession and then drowned them in the bath a few days afterwards (claiming that they had suffered from epileptic fits) to collect their insurance money: "George Joseph Smith, murderer, bigamist, swindler, performer on the harmonium and one of the most consummate scoundrels who ever lived...”

I look forward to reading it.

In the first pages, I come across a couple of wonderful sketches. The first is of a judge.

“Although he lacked the polish of a Coleridge or the dignity of a Cockburn, and was not distinguished for any great wealth of erudition, Lord Alverstone matched his great predecessors in the office of Lord Chief Justice as much by his uncanny gift for reducing the most complicated set of facts to a coherent and deceptively simple narrative, as by the dominating force of his personality. A kindly man, who was always particularly helpful to young and inexperienced barristers, he could, when occasion demanded it, be as stern and inflexible as any martinet who ever sat on the Bench; it was fatal, as many counsel found to their cost, to attempt any liberties with him. His impressive appearance—he was a big man with an enormous head and heavy features—contributed notably to the ease with which at all times he maintained the great traditions, and indeed the majesty, of his office.

Then there is this summary of a case:

“The facts are these: Thomas Weldon Anderson, whose stage name was Atherstone, was a married man living apart from his wife; there were two sons of the marriage, both of them dear to their father. For some ten years past he had been living with a lady, formerly an actress, but more lately engaged as a 'teacher of expression' at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Gower Street, Bloomsbury. It was a liaison punctuated by violent quarrels and doubtful reconciliations, of which the main cause was undoubtedly Anderson's almost insane jealousy.