The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes
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Authors: Roger Wilkes
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 1999
This revised edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2005
Collection copyright © Roger Wilkers 1999, 2005
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that is shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1-84529-149-2
eISBN: 978-1-78033-373-1
Printed and bound in the EU
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INTRODUCTION
Roger Wilkes
(Rachel Nickell, 1992)
Brian Masters
THE SHORT, SWEET MARTYRDOM OF JAKE LINGLE
(Jake Lingle, 1930)
Kenneth Allsop
THE SECRET JANET TOOK TO THE GRAVE
(Janet Brown, 1995)
David James Smith
(Mary Rogers, 1841)
Irving Wallace
(Julia Wallace, 1931)
F. Tennyson Jesse
(Sacco and Vanzetti, 1920)
Louis Stark
(Fred Oesterreich, 1922)
Alan Hynd
THE MYSTERY OF THE POISONED PARTRIDGES
(Hubert Chevis, 1931)
C.J.S. Thompson
(James Maybrick, 1889)
Maurice Moiseiwitsch
THE OBSESSION WITH THE BLACK DAHLIA
(Elizabeth Short, 1947)
Russell Miller
“COLONEL HOGAN’S” UNSOLVED MURDER
(Bob Crane, 1978)
John Austin
(Edwin Bartlett, 1875)
Christianna
Brand
(Mrs Morrell and Mrs Hullett, 1957)
Eric Ambler
(Rev. Hall and Mrs Mills, 1922)
James Thurber
(Martin Guerre, 1560)
Elliott O’Donnell
THE CASE OF THE SALMON SANDWICHES
(Annie Hearn, 1930)
Daniel Farson
(Sir Harry Oakes, 1943)
Julian Symons
(Nan Patterson, 1904)
Alexander Woollcott
(Brighton Trunk Murder, 1934)
Jonathan Goodman
(William Burke Kirwan, 1852)
William
Roughead
(William Desmond Taylor, 1922)
Erle Stanley Gardner
THE DUMB BLONDE WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
(Marilyn Monroe, 1962)
Kirk Wilson
(William Gardiner, 1902)
Jack Smith-Hughes
(Jessie Costello, 1933)
Sydney Horler
(The Whitechapel Murders, 1888)
Philip Sugden
(Margery Wren, 1930)
Douglas G. Browne and E.V. Tullett
(Zodiac Killings, 1968)
Colin Wilson
(Florence Bravo, 1876)
Dorothy Dunbar
(Shergar, 1983)
John Edwards
(Andrew and Abby Borden, 1892)
Angela Carter
(Robert Wood, 1907)
Nina Warner Hooke and Gil Thomas
ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN’S FINAL PAYOFF
(Arnold Rothstein, 1929)
Damon Runyon
(Bella Wright, 1919)
Edmund Pearson
THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF STARR FAITHFULL
(Starr Faithfull, 1931)
Morris Markey
THE MAN WHO CONTRACTED OUT OF HUMANITY
(Stanley Setty, 1949)
Rebecca West
(Various Victims, 1964–5)
John du Rose
Twenty-five years ago, I disturbed the bones of an old murder case. It was unsolved; a man had been convicted but then freed on appeal, and no one else had subsequently been brought to book. Back in 1931, the hot-from-the-hob headlines had blazed the tale. An insurance agent called Wallace had murdered his drab little wife, beating out her brains in their blood-boltered front parlour in Liverpool with such unclerkly ferocity that the walls were streaked, spattered and flecked as high as the picture rail. Wallace was accused of having devised an alibi of consummate cunning, involving the critical synchromesh of logged telephone calls, word-of-mouth messages, at least three tram timetables and a bogus appointment. Picking it over for a radio programme half a century later, a panel of experts agreed that Wallace did not murder his wife—indeed, could not have done so. Moreover, newly uncovered testimony suggested a different solution and buttressed the case against a different suspect, a much younger man who boasted secret CID connections, a propensity to steal and to dissemble, and who nursed a grudge against Wallace. Yet amid the excitement of discovery, we discerned an unexpected note of melancholy. It now seemed a shame to spoil a perfectly good whodunnit. We had, in a sense, performed the reverse of alchemy and transmuted the burnished gold of mystery into dross. Solving the riddle had diminished the story, reduced it to a commonplace. Everyone loves a good murder, but especially a murder that defies solution, that continues to frustrate and ultimately defeat our forensic skills and the constructs of logic. We’d rather our unsolved crimes remain unsolved. What draws us is the magnetic field of mystery.
For more than three hundred years, readers of crime fiction have accorded with the seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne. “I love to lose myself in a mystery,” declared this strange and curious sage in one of his few homespun moments. But his enthusiasm was characteristically prognostic—he had identified a trend that was only to achieve its full flowering a full three centuries later during the Golden Age of the detective novel. The English poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was a self-confessed addict, but viewed the popularity of the whodunnit as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty, the dialectic of innocence and guilt. Auden was anxious to dignify the genre. He described the
noir
tales of the American Raymond Chandler, a writer of the hard-boiled school, as serious studies of a criminal
milieu
, to be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art. And yet, detective fiction is imprisoned within a basic formula. It is a ritual, as Auden himself reminds us: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.”
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