Murder Houses of Edinburgh

Jan Bondeson

Matador True Crime 2020

Pb, 432pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781800460676

Thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical studies at its university in the 1860s, Edinburgh bequeathed us our greatest literary sleuth.

Sherlock Holmes’s creator was intimate with the city mapped out here – and all the darkness and despair contained within the highest and lowest of abodes.

Jan Bondeson, who has previously made an equivalent survey of London, begins at Edinburgh’s grandest murder house, Holyrood Palace, where Mary Queen of Scots’ Italian valet David Rizzo was stabbed in front of her in 1566 by noblemen who claimed he was an enemy spy but really had designs on the throne. Bondeson tracks the growth of the city from the Royal Mile through the expansion that rendered the surrounding slum tenements a teeming pit of depravity and death exploited by Burke and Hare to make a killing out of killing.

Madness here was rife and husbands routinely battered their wives to death for the pennies to buy more whisky.

In the more salubrious squares of south Edinburgh, ambitious but lazy scions just as regularly destroyed their own families to try and cop a quick inheritance – scenarios Holmes would be only too familiar with.

There is only one case here he might make a two pipe problem from – that of John Donald Merrett, who murdered his mother, forged enough money to hire eminent pathologist Bernard Spilsbury to prove he didn’t and went on to reinvent himself as dashing Navy officer Ronald Chesney – before coming to such a bad end that his severed arms are a permanent exhibit in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum.

But, as the routine patterns of pitiless brutality for pitiful gain go on repeating themselves, you may also find yourself reaching for the morphine.

Cathi Unsworth

★★★★