Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone, and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours; the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away.
                          -- Henry James, letter to crime historian William Roughead

of murder legends), and on crimes that provide the basis for significant literary works. My interest in foreign languages and other cultures has resulted in examination of cases beyond America and Britain, the setting of the cases of so many of my predecessors.
     "The Snows on the Moors," my essay on the books of C.P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson about the Moors murder cases, stands as a general introduction to my writing on crime and punishment.
     Many great writers about crime have had the imaginative power to place themselves in the criminals' place. The identification by Robert Louis Stevenson of elements of his personality with the impulses of Mr. Hyde combined with Stevenson's knowledge of British criminal history to produce his great tale, which is discussed in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Stevenson." Just as Stevenson could identify himself with a murderer, so Thackeray felt strong empathy with a hanged man. My essay, "Why Thackeray Went to See a Man Hanged," shows a writer in one of his most attractive relations to crime, as spokesman for the public conscience. Thackeray was, like most of his contemporaries, fascinated with crime and criminal history, and even felt in himself a certain morbid interest in public hanging. But when he went to see a man hanged, he was revolted; it was this experience that provided the basis for his eloquent and uniquely personal protest against capital punishment.
     Dickens's attraction to the exploration of the criminal mind increased in his late works and became remarkably intense in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his unfinished novel. In my essay on Mystery of Edwin Drood, I note the range of detective-story techniques which Dickens would have had at his disposal in arriving at a solution of the mystery. The debates about the ending of Drood will doubtless go on, but Dickens's work went far enough to establish one point beyond dispute: that in a detective-story format, social issues can be addressed and good literature can be the result.
     The genius-criminal has long been an intriguing subject for true crime writers. Yet, history records few portraits of creative geniuses as murderers. We have the crimes of the composer Gesualdo and the painter Caravaggio, but they were crimes of passion committed in the violent years of Renaissance and 17th century Italy. It is true that in 1679 Jean Racine, the great French dramatist, was accused of poisoning his mistress, the actress Mlle. Duparc, and of stealing a valuable diamond from her finger which she lay on her deathbed. But nobody took this charge too seriously, since Racine's accuser, La Voisin, was herself one of the leading poisoners of the time. And even if Racine was guilty, he had done no more than succumb to the bad habits of his age, when arsenic was used so routinely to pass riches from hand to hand that it became known as "inheritance powder."

     The essay on the legend of the murder of Mozart by Salieri presents musicians in the roles of murderer and victim. One of the comforts of the classic detective story is that we never much care about the murder victims who are regularly disposed of at the vicarage or on the train. However, history does not spare our feelings and gives us many painful examples of beloved geniuses who were murdered or, as in Mozart's case, seriously thought to have been murdered. I was particularly attracted to the Mozart murder legend, not only by my love for Mozart and his music, but because the legend gave rise to one of the great literary works exploring the relation between genius and criminality, Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri.
     The case of Aldo Braibanti concerns a writer as criminal defendant, facing a charge of "psychological kidnapping" of two young men. In Braibanti's trial, as in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the defendant's leftist writings were put in evidence. His essays were considered as competent to show how he might have exercised undue influence on two unsophisticated youths. It is a disturbing assumption of the Braibanti case that the tie between literature and conduct can be proved to the satisfaction of a jury in a criminal court. More broadly, the Braibanti case raises a legal question which became of interest in connection with the trail of Patty Hearst, namely, the extent to which concepts like "brainwashing" can be effectively defined and determined by traditional criminal rules.
     The Braibanti article, which was originally published in the American Bar Association Journal, has given me special rewards. First, the term, "psychological kidnapping," which I coined as a free translation of the Italian crime with which Braibanti was charged, has now passed into common use. Furthermore, the article has aroused the interest of those taking opposite positions on the issues raised by the case, including on the one hand parents and prosecutors concerned with the loss of children to proselytizing cults, and on the other, professionals who oppose the use of psychiatric confinement or reconditioning of wayward citizens or children by parents and repressive governments.
     In the study of Latouche and Clarisse Manson, I explore the famous Fualdes murder case, in early-nineteenth-century France, which inspired a series of drawings by Gericault. Here there is a curious double interaction between fact and fiction. In the course of the trials of Fualdes's accused murderers, the principal witness, Clarisse Manson, who may have been a pathological liar, turned her unreliable trial testimony into a memoir. Her book was written in collaboration with the journalist and man of letters Henri de Latouche, who apparently shared her difficulty in separating fact from imagination.

     In "The Jackal and I, or How to Do Research in London," I tell all my professional secrets about how I go about gathering material for my English crime essays. In view of the problems I encountered (which are amusing only in retrospect), the essay can hardly be regarded as inspirational to other writers who are interested in the crime field, but it has the merit of being true.
     In my 1982 collection of essays, A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives: Ten Crimes and a Scandal (Kent State University Press, 1982), I continued to pursue the two special interests that dominated my first book, Innocence and Arsenic: Studies in Crime and Literature (Harper & Row, 1977) - criminal cases and traditions in which writers, musicians, or intellectuals have been involved either as actual participants or observers or as the subjects of accusations or legends; and crimes that have inspired significant works of literature or music. My study of the Manning case of 1849, The Woman Who Murdered Black Satin: The Bermondsey Horror (Ohio State University Press, 1981), shows both strands of this subject matter closely interwoven. Dickens attended the Mannings' trial and execution as an observer and their execution provoked his masterly letters to the London Times advocating an end to public hanging. A few years later, Dickens as novelist assimilated and reworked the personality and gestures of Mrs. Manning as the raw material for his portrayal of the murderess Mlle. Hortense in Bleak House.
     Four essays in the Legal Studies Forum collection illustrate direct confrontations between creative artists or intellectuals and crime. In "Innocence and Arsenic: The Literary and Criminal Careers of C.J.L. Almquist," a distinguished nineteenth-century Swedish writer appears in the unusual role of a convicted would-be murderer. The artist-criminal is for me one of the most beguiling figures in crime history, since he raises a number of unyielding issues. Of these, the foremost is the problem posed by Pushkin at the end of his play Mozart and Salieri: to what extent are genius and criminality compatible? In the career of Almquist this question emerges in a more disturbing variant: can the very inner forces that fuel literary imagination also cause a weakened sense of reality to misgovern the external behavior of the writer?
     Closely related to the few documented cases of artist-criminals are the instances in which tradition has, generally without any justification, branded an artist as a murderer. In this genre the Mozart-Salieri poisoning myth has won revived fame. My essay on that subject is, I believe, the most detailed study in English; Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus has now made the old slander against Salieri a household word. However, dark legends involving homicidal musicians antedate 

Mozart's time. My essay, "Lully and the Death of Cambert," recounts another chapter in murder folklore from the music worlds of seventeenth-century Paris and London. As in the case of the accusations against Salieri, this earlier legend stemmed from the intense competitiveness of musicians and, more particularly, from the understandable rivalry of opera composers vying for limited performance opportunities. Unlike Mozart and Cambert, eighteen-century composer Jean-Marie Leclair was undisputably murdered; my essay "Finale Marked Presto: The Killing of Leclair" is based on contemporaneous police archives.
     It is only natural that a student of the crimes of brilliant people will propound another question: are they as ingenious in the perpetration of murder as in their nobler pursuits? The answer is disappointing, for the artist or intellectual is often observed to be a bungling criminal. This homely truth is demonstrated not only in my Almquist article but also in "The Janitor's Story: An Ethical Dilemma in the Harvard Murder Case" which deals with the failure of the talented Harvard chemist and professor John W. Webster to obliterate the remains of his victim. The genius does not necessarily make a good criminal.
     Fortunately, men and women of genius who have participated in criminal cases usually play a more constructive role; they have often appeared as advocates, either out of professional obligation or for considerations of personal loyalty or ideological conviction. The noble tradition of the writer in combat for justice has embraced the crusades of Emile Zola and Arthur Conan Doyle, and in our own times the campaign of Arthur Miller to vindicate Peter Reilly. The brilliant seventeenth-century letter writer Mme. de Sevigne was a devoted partisan of the cause of her close friend, Nicolas Fouquet, the fallen finance minister of Louis XIV charged with treason and embezzlement of State funds. Her letters describing Fouquet's trial are replete with political and legal insight and also candidly reveal an effort to bring her considerable personal influence and charm to bear on the outcome of the court proceedings. By contrast with Mme. de Sevigne's active sideline monitoring of Fouquet's trial, Jane Austen's reaction to her Aunt Jane Leigh Perrot's prosecution for shoplifting is a matter for speculation, since at her aunt's insistence she was not permitted to attend the court sessions. However, it is the conclusion of "The Trial of Jane's Aunt" that Mrs. Leigh Perrot's ordeal has left its traces in the pages of her famous niece's novels.
     The impact of factual crime on works of literature and music, the second principal subject of my writing, is, of course, a much broader category than the history of direct participation by authors and artists in criminal cases. As early as 1592, we find in Arden of Faversham an English drama closely patterned on the lurid facts of a family murder, and its progeny have been countless. An attempt to survey the immense 

debt of theatre and fiction to crime history (the "gallery of sinister perspective," as Henry James called it in an admiring letter to his friend, the Scottish crime writer William Roughead) would be beyond the reach of bibliography, not to mention literary analysis. However, no serious study of landmarks of crime literature can fail to pay respect to Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, perhaps the most persuasive assertion of the power of the creative imagination to free the human facts of crime from the limitations of the trial record. In "The Ring and the Book and the Murder" I accept Browning's sermon that lawyers do not have a monopoly over the quest for the truth about crime. A similar lesson is, in fact, urged in "'Under Sentence of Death': Literary Views on Capital Punishment," in which it is suggested that the literature of the last three centuries may have as much to tell us about the death penalty as our own judges and econometrics experts.
     An earlier analogue to the seventeenth-century Italian murder case that inspired The Ring and the Book is the immortal conspiracy of Beatrice Cenci and her brothers against their father, Francesco. My essay, "Portraits of Beatrice." traces the literary and musical transformations of the Cenci tragedy from Shelley's poetic drama to Alberto Ginastera's opera that was performed at the New York City Opera in 1973. No better example can be cited of the manner in which a classic crime, when studied through the ages by artists of sensibility, can serve as a touchstone of changing social attitudes.
     Crime of the late nineteenth century is represented by an essay in a lighter vein. In "Gilbert and Sullivan on Corporation Law: Utopia, Limited and the Panama Canal Frauds" I point out (apparently for the first time) the direct inspiration of the late Savoyard opera by the Panama Canal fraud case that was proceeding in Paris in the year of Utopia's premiere (1893). The excesses of the canal's promoters confirmed the wildest fantasies of business abuses that Gilbert, a failed barrister, had scattered throughout the pages of his earlier librettos. The ever darkening era of contemporary crime is reflected in my study of the manifold true-crime sources of Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams, who is a relentless and thoughtful student of modern murder cases.
     This issue of the Legal Studies Forum also brings together for the first time seventeen of my previously uncollected studies on a wide range of subjects, including the founder of the French Surete, Eugene-Francois Vidocq; Russian dramatist Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, who drew his themes from Tsarist judicial persecution; forerunners of the Tylenol poisonings; a new look at the murder trials of Alice Crimmins; and my pre-verdict attempt to explain the murder trial of O.J. Simpson to the English.

* This preface, now revised, is drawn from the preface to Innocence and Arsenic: Studies in Crime and Literature (Harper & Row, 1977) and the preface to A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives: Ten Crimes and a Scandal (Kent State University Press, 1982).