Mapping murders Cathi Unsworth

Explores a fine resource for historians and crime writers

Murder Maps

Crime Scenes Revisited Drew Gray

Thames & Hudson 2020

Hb, 224pp, £25, ISBN 9780500252451

We are all familiar with the components of sensational crimes: an outrage that upends our notions of common decency and law enforcement’s hunt to bring down the killer, harried by the bloodhounds of the press. What Drew Gray aims to illustrate in this handsome volume is how that process developed during the 19th century, as the industrial revolution drove populations into everexpanding cities, and detection methods adapted to societal shifts and the attendant advances of science and philosophical thinking.

His samples are culled from “the world’s most crimeridden cities and regions” in Europe, North America and Australia, and his use of cartography inspired by psychologist David Canter’s contribution to offender profiling. In mapping the movements of the miscreants we can, Gray says, “observe links between poverty, wealth, architecture and immigration in the geography of killing”.

This comprehensive compendium – 123 cases in all – sets off on the most notorious quarter of London, the Ratcliffe Highway of 1811. Gray moves through the metropolis, recording the beginnings of forensics, toxicology, composite portrait, criminal profiling and fingerprinting. These murders are both infamous – Jack the Ripper, Crippen – and depressingly domestic, illustrated with innovative crime scene photographs and the evocative Illustrated Police News.

From here, via a sighting of Jack in Liverpool, he moves into France, where former convict EugéneFrançois Vidocq led Paris’s first detective agency,

Alphonse Bertillon invented the “mug shot” and took the most haunting photographs presented here, the death scenes of women who died with their lacedup boots on. Here we meet “the French Jack”, Joseph Vacher, who tried to dress up his voracious sex murders – as many as 25 of them – as political acts. In Italy, Gray charts the progress of protoMafioso gangs through a century of political turmoil, banditry and mutating land borders. Then it’s on to North America, where with the mass immigration of malcontents from the Old World, cycles of poverty, racism and entrepreneurialism created new frontiers of criminality. In Australia, victims are at their most vulnerable – babies and children forming a core of cases predicated by desperate social conditions. Jack the Ripper turns up again on each new continent. There is an incredible amount of information stylishly compressed into this layout – but therein also lies its problems. The maps themselves, mainly drawn from the David Rumsey collection, look beautiful. But when the contours are dense, finding the tiny annotative dots requires a magnifying glass. They also lack the contextualising information, such as would be found on Booth’s Poverty Maps, to illustrate the contributory social factors to each crime. Gray doesn’t surmise much of his own conclusions in his text – which, by necessity is so concise it borders on terse – leaving the readers to don their own deerstalkers. But he does provide a Further Reading List and a fine resource for historians and crime writers alike to reimagine that other vital element: the stories behind those lives cut short, that cry out to us still. ★★★★