The Detection of Crime " HERE'S richness " for the

man who loves a good murder— three whole books largely about murders. They are written from three quite separate points of view. Mr. Adam has done what has often been done before—namely, made a book out of a number of celebrated cases, but he has broken new ground in choosing only those tantalizing ones in which the criminal has never been caught. Mr. Rhodes writes entirely of scientific methods of detection, chiefly in laboratories, the tests for arsenic or for bloodstains, the examination of dust

or tobacco ash, the measuring of footprints. Mr. Wensley is the detective of real life. He tries not to make our flesh creep, but to give a modest and straightforward account of an extraordinarily interesting career.

George Borrow, when compiling his Lives and Trials, con-

ceived an admiration for the writers of the Newgate Calendar because of their power of telling a plain story. He would

have approved of Mr. Wensley rather than of Mr. Adam, and I respectfully think he would have been right. Mr. Wensley has a splendid contempt for the purple patch. He tells a plain story in careful detail, being wholly concerned to try to make us see the kind of difficulties that a detective has to tackle, and how he does it. Mr. Adam, on the other hand,

has a romantic vocabulary and occasionally cannot refrain from displaying it :

" Even in the midst of that peaceful calm there was swiftly and almost noiselessly enacted a grim tragedy which has since baffled the analytical minds of the most astute criminologists to interpret."

That sentence does not get us much " forrarder," and comes near to padding. Still, we must not be too censorious or ungrateful to one who has collected an exciting set of stories and tells them on the whole briskly enough.

Mr. Wensley spent most of his working life in the East End, and only towards the end of his career came to Scotland Yard. As a young constable he patrolled the Whitechapel streets during Jack the Ripper's reign of terror ; as a detective he helped to hang Seaman and the brothers Reuben ; he ran down Stinie Morrison and was a leader in the long chase that ended in the battle of Sidney Street. He was on unpleasantly active service in that battle, for he had to lie for half an hour on a roof, very imperfectly sheltered by a gutter while bullets from the automatic pistols of the besieged men pattered cheerfully all round him.

The story of that chase after Fritz and Joseph and the elusive Peter the Painter is told at full length and admirably well. We realize something at least of the difficulty of getting evidence from unintelligible aliens, some merely liars, some afraid of the murderers and some trying to shield them. It was a question of listening and watching and picking up here and there a stray and guarded hint as to a woman or a house. This gathering and taking of hints was clearly one of Mr. lirensley's strong points ; he knew the Whitechapel slums as a man knows his own house, and seems to have been on terms of a sort of armed friendliness with half its ruffians :

" Pure reasoning " (he says) " is all very well, but the blood and bones of all practical detective work is information. . . . 1 realized that I had to get to know informants and to win their confidence. To that end I laid down one strict rule for myself— always to keep faith."

We wish that now in his retirement Mr. Wensley could be a little indiscreet and tell how he got his information.

But, of course, he cannot, and will not. The same difficulty besets Mr. Adam. Once or twice he tells us what the police believed though they could not prove it. There was a German pastor, for instance, who apparently committed an atrocious murder in Great Comm Street and not merely " got away with it " by a false alibi but received a handsome subscription and Mr. Gladstone's congratulations into the bargain. As a rule, however, the author must be, and is, discreet. Many of his mysteries are famous ones. Peasenhall, Ardlamont, Gorse Hall, Merstham Tunnel—these have a familiar as well as a stirring ring in the ears, but there are some more recondite and none better than the murder of Mr. Roper, the young

R.E. subaltern, at Chatham in 1881. At half-past eight Roper left the mess, saying he had to finish a letter, and went towards his quarters. About half an hour later his servant found his body on the staircase leading to his room. He

had been shot at close quarters. Near by was the revolver of a brother officer (who had nothing to do with it), some cartridges, the poker from Roper's room, his watch and some of his civilian clothes in a bundle. Two drawers in the room were open and the lid of a box pulled off, and that is all. Why the clothes unless, as has been suggested, a soldier was trying to steal the means to desert ? And why the poker ? A householder in the small hours may take a poker if he hears a noise, but not a young officer in his quarters at nine o'clock. Nobody was known to have any quarrel with Roper, and I have been told by a relation who was a rather senior subaltern at Chatham at the time that no onp was ever suspected. Humanly speaking, it must have been

someone in the barracks, and there we come to a full stop for ever.

Perhaps Mr. Rhodes's men of science could have done some- thing. They make us feel sorry for the criminal. Is it, for example, quite cricket to brush the coats of poor coiners and to find that the dust contains antimony, tin and lead in the same proportion as do the counterfeit coins ? By the way, Dr. Locard, Director of the Technical Laboratories of Police at Lyons, first turned his attention to dust on account of Sher lock Holmes. The ghost of that great man must surely be bowing and blushing with pleasure just as he did when he broke the sixth bust of Napoleon and displayed the black