Killing time
HEATHER SHORE revisits Victorian London’s murky underworld via a real-life murder mystery
The Mile End Murder by Sinclair McKay Aurum Press, 320 pages, £20
In 1901 Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, turned his attention to a historical case featuring many of the elements that had become the stock in trade of the detective genre: a sensational murder, a killer who had entered and left the victim’s house without trace, and a potential miscarriage of justice.
The murder that enthralled Conan Doyle had taken place in London’s East End four decades earlier, in 1860. The Holmes author’s investigations frame the opening chapter of this popular history: as the book’s strapline explains, this was ‘The Case Conan Doyle Couldn’t Solve’. Despite this, the great author is not a major actor in the drama – his investigations are largely relegated to the last two chapters, and even then dealt with only briefly.
Even so, the book provides a readable reconstruction of the life and death of Mary Emsley, the investigation into the murder of this wealthy widow, and the subsequent trial of a suspect. It succeeds as a murder mystery, echoing the newly minted genre of detective fiction that would emerge from the mid-Victorian period. It also works well as a study of the 19th-century metropolis. Enjoyable contextual details help us understand the late Georgian east London in which Emsley grew up, and the circumstances of her life that would eventually lead to her violent death. The story encompasses complicated relationships, family secrets and missing wills – common ingredients in the sensational fiction of an era that produced The Moonstone (1868), often described as the first detective novel.
McKay has a deft eye for the details of the local communities in which Emsley lived, and the minutiae of the everyday lives of her neighbours and (few) friends. However, there are crucial omissions. The author certainly gives the impression of having done his research; however, an afterword on both the primary and secondary sources used would have been welcome. McKay draws extensively on press reports, court transcripts, depositions and police reports to reconstruct Emsley’s life and the circumstances of the murder, so a brief afterword mapping the sources would have provided some needed authority. And though McKay paints a rich and vivid picture of the Victorian metropolis, at times some lazy assumptions are made about the East End and its community. Nevertheless, though I remain unconvinced of the author’s identification of the real murderer, I enjoyed reading his case for the prosecution.