Trial of Louise Masset - Notable British Trials No. 85

For anyone interested in the history of crime and punishment, the Notable British Trials series has long been a rich source of reliable information. The original series, published by William Hodge and Company, became extremely well-known, and its recent revival by Mango Books is welcome. The second of the "Mango" titles has now been published; it is the Trial of Louise Masset, edited by Kate Clarke.

I must admit that I knew next to nothing about this case, sometimes known as "the Dalston mystery", before picking up this book. It deals with that most horrible of crimes, the murder of a very young and defenceless child. The body was soon identified as three-year old Manfred Masset. His mother Louise was the prime suspect right from the outset.

Louise was a governess in her mid-thirties. Manfred was illegitimate, and in the late 1890s, that was of course a source of social stigma. The position of an unmarried mother was extremely difficult and stressful. Louise vehemently denied killing her own child. On her account she'd already arrived in Brighton, where she was planning to spend the week-end with her new lover, Eudore Lewis (Eudore is a new name to me, I must admit.) The couple registered in the hotel under false names, claiming to be brother and sister.

Louise's denials didn't persuade the police. Eventually, they failed to persuade the jury. She was sentenced to death, and became the first person to be executed in Britain in the 20th century, a miserable distinction. But as Kate Clarke explains, the case was less straightforward than it might seem. There are some remarkable ingredients, not least the involvement of Arthur Newton, the dodgiest solicitor of his era, who would later act for Dr Crippen. Train times come into the story, rather as in a mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts. All in all, a welcome addition to an excellent series.

Notable British Trials is Back!

More than sixty years have passed since the last entry appeared in the renowned series of Notable British Trials, published by William Hodge and Co. Now, I'm pleased to have had the chance to read a brand new entry in the series - number 84, no less. It's the Trial of Israel Lipski, edited by true crime writer M.W. Oldridge, and published by Mango Books under licence from William Hodge.

Pleasingly, this volume includes a lengthy foreword which provides a history of how Notable British Trials came into being. It's a fascinating story, and some of Oldridge's predecessors were legends of true crime writing - the likes of William Roughead and Frin Tennyson Jesse. Classic cases covered include those of Adelaide Bartlett, Florence Maybrick, Alfred Monson, and Buck Ruxton,

The famous trials are interesting in themselves. They also provide a vast amount of information for writers, not just true crime writers, but also novelists. When I was working on Dancing for the Hangman, I studied Filson Young's book about the trial of Dr Crippen very carefully. I was trying to write a novel which respected the facts that were known (while using fictional skills to explain the apparently inexplicable parts of the story), and the trial transcript gave me a great deal of help.

In line with the tradition of these books, Oldridge contributes a detailed introduction which sets the case in context. Lipski's murder of Miram Angel in 1887 attracted a good deal of attention at at the time, and the case does have intriguing features, although I find it less mysterious than, say the Bartlett or Maybrick cases. There are illustrations, and all in all I think Mango have done true crime fans a real service in bringing this famous publishing brand back to life.

The Return of Notable British Trials

Regular readers of this blog will know of my enthusiasm for true crime cases, and books about them. It's this interest that fuelled my novel Dancing for the Hangman, my non-fiction book Urge to Kill, and my CWA anthology Truly Criminal. And I've enjoyed many fascinating conversations with criminologists - only the other day I had a very pleasant lunch with someone who did ground-breaking research on the legendary Wallace case, and who turns out to live just a few miles away.

Given all that, I was naturally delighted to learn from Kate Clarke that the Notable British Trials series of books is to enjoy a new lease of life, after a hiatus lasting more than half a century. This is, I imagine, another spin-off of changes within the publishing industry, and the economics of publishing, and very welcome it is. The new publishers, taking a licence from the rights owners, are Mango Books, evidently a young and forward- looking company.

Adam Wood, who runs Mango, told me: "One of the intriguing parts of identifying cases which should be added to the NBT series is whether a transcript of the trial is available. We prepared a list of cases which were obvious omissions in the original series, but on further investigation realised that none existed in the obvious places and that's probably why William Hodge didn't include them. Thankfully, with the British Newspaper Archives now available online, we are able to access contemporary newspaper reports of trials, many of which are very detailed. This means we're able to piece together a trial without a formal transcript, or at least a complete one. It's been a lot of fun walking in the footsteps of the likes of William Roughead and W. Teignmouth Shore."

The first title in the series will be The Trial of Israel Lipski, to be edited by experienced true crime writer M.W. Oldridge. Two more forthcoming titles will feature a pair of railway-related mysteries - more "blood on the tracks"! I've read a number of the original books in the series, and found them very helpful with a range of projects, as well as fascinating in their own right. So I'm certainly awaiting the publication of the new titles with eager anticipation.