Chapter 1

If I were asked what were the best qualifications for a detective I
should say to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. That,
perhaps, is because I happen to be an indifferent jack-of-all-trades
myself, and I cannot remember any smattering that I acquired in distant
corners of the earth that did not come in useful at Scotland Yard.

Other countries try to make specialists of their detectives. They would
have them know chemistry, surgery, and mineralogy; they would have
them competent to appraise the value of jewels, to judge the time a
corpse has been dead, or how long a footprint has been impressed upon
damp earth. They forget that there is a specialist round every corner,
and that a detective who knows his work knows also where to find a
jeweller or a doctor or skilled mechanic who will give him a far better
opinion than his own. All that they succeed in doing is to furnish a
very alluring laboratory for the edification of visitors and saddle
themselves with a host of theorists who make a very poor show by the
test of the statistics of discovered crime.

Real life is quite unlike detective fiction; in fact, in detective work
fiction is stranger than truth. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, to whom I take
off my hat with a silent prayer that he may never appear in the flesh,
worked by induction, but not, so far as I am able to judge, by the
only method which gets home, namely, organisation and hard work. He
consumed vast quantities of drugs and tobacco. I do not know how much
his admirable achievements owed to these, but I do know that if we at
Scotland Yard had faithfully copied his processes we should have ended
by fastening upon a distinguished statesman or high dignitary of the
Church the guilt of some revolting crime.

The detection of crime consists in good organisation, hard work,
and luck, in about equal proportions: when the third ingredient
predominates the detective is very successful indeed. Among many
hundred examples the Voisin murder at the end of 1917 may be cited.
The murderer had cut off the head and hands of his victim in the hope
that identification would be impossible, and he chose the night of an
air-raid for his crime because the victim might be expected to have
left London in a panic; but he had forgotten a little unobtrusive
laundry mark on her clothing, and by this he was found, convicted,
and executed. That was both luck and organisation. Scotland Yard has
the enormous advantage over Mr. Sherlock Holmes in that it has an
organisation which can scour every pawnshop, every laundry, every
public-house, and even every lodging-house in the huge area of London
within a couple of hours.

I took charge of the Criminal Investigation Department in June 1913.
The late Sir Melville Macnaghten, my predecessor, who wrote his
reminiscences, held the view that the proper function of the head
of the C.I.D. was to help and encourage his men but not to hamper
them with interference. He had an astonishing memory both for faces
and for names: he could tell you every detail about a ten-year-old
crime, the names of the victim, the perpetrator, and every important
witness, and, what was more useful, the official career of every one
of his seven hundred men and his qualifications and ability. Unlike
my predecessors, I had already a wide acquaintance among criminals,
chiefly those of the professional class. To read their records was
to me like looking at crime through the big end of the telescope. At
Dartmoor I had 1200 of them, nearly all professionals with anything
from one to thirty previous convictions. There were Scotsmen, Irishmen,
Welshmen, and Englishmen, with a good sprinkling of foreigners, some of
whom had come to England when their own countries had become too hot
to hold them. When you read of crime in the magazines or the detective
novels it is nearly always murder. You have to be in charge of a prison
in order to realise that the murderer is rarely a criminal by nature
at all. But for the grace of God he is just you and I, only more
unlucky. For the real criminal you have to go to the crimes against
property. Most murders are committed without any deep-laid plot,
whereas the professional thief or forger or fraud has carefully planned
his depredations before he sets out to commit them: the murderer is
repentant, and is planning only how he can earn an honest living
after he is discharged; the others are thinking out schemes for fresh
adventures.

Criminal investigation was not quite what I expected to find it. The
Department was well organised, though perhaps a little rusty in the
hinges. The danger of centralisation had been realised long before.
London had been divided into twenty-one divisions, each with a Criminal
Investigation staff whose business it was to know everything about its
portion of the huge city. These divisional staffs dealt with all the
ordinary crime that occurred in the division: it was only the graver
crimes or those that were spread over several divisions that were taken
up by the staff of the Central Office. In such cases it was usual to
detach a Chief Inspector to take charge of the inquiry. Every day we
received a thick bundle of forms in which every crime, however small,
committed in London during the previous twenty-four hours was reported.
The graver of these formed the subject of a separate report, and there
was the excellent practice of making a detailed report upon every
suspected crime as soon as it occurred, because one could never tell
into what it might develop.

The Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard is not
responsible for the crimes committed out of London, but by an
arrangement with the Home Office a Chief Constable may ask the
Department for help to unravel any serious crime committed in his area
without any cost to the local authority. That this permission is not
always acted on is due less to the very natural _amour propre_ of the
local force than to the difficulty in determining what difficulties
lie ahead. The larger cities have, moreover, efficient detective
organisations of their own: most of them have sent men to be trained
in the Detective Classes at New Scotland Yard; these have greatly
distinguished themselves in the examinations.

The training of detectives was almost entirely legal and, as far as it
went, it was admirably done. It was essential that they should know
the rudiments of the Criminal Law as well as the procedure of the
Criminal Courts, otherwise they were bound, sooner or later, to commit
some solecism that would incur the comments of the Judge. But on its
practical side their education was neglected. Very few were craftsmen,
and if it came to making an exhaustive search of a house they might
be expected to look conscientiously in all the obvious places and make
no search for such hiding-places as a short board in the floor or the
space behind the wainscot; probably none of them had ever watched
a house in the course of erection. It is only by experience and by
failure that real proficiency in the matter of searching is acquired.
Nor were they taught any uniform method of description. The average
police description was a very colourless document, for in any crowd one
might find a dozen men with a ‘fresh complexion, blue eyes, brown hair,
oval face, and medium height.’ Such matters as peculiarities of gait
and speech were very often omitted. They did not always know the trade
names of articles of clothing or plate or jewellery, nor could they
distinguish between real stones and pearls and their counterfeits. The
more intelligent picked up these things by experience, but the others
did not. Many of them seemed to me to be unimaginative in the matter of
observation; at any rate, they seemed seldom to follow a man without
his becoming aware of it. On the other hand, they were admirable when
it came to dealing with the public. Their courtesy never failed, and
naturally it brought them much help from the people living in their
locality.

I soon found that the London detectives were naturally divided into two
classes, the detective and the ‘thief-catcher.’ The latter belonged to
the class of honest, painstaking policeman without sufficient education
to pass examinations for promotion, but who made up for this deficiency
by his intimate knowledge of the rougher class of criminals, his habits
and his haunts, and by personal acquaintance with the pickpockets
themselves, who had the same regard for him as a naughty little boy
has for a strict and just schoolmaster. The ‘thief-catcher’ has no
animus against the people he has to watch. He keeps his eye upon them
warily, as the keeper at the Zoo keeps his eye upon the Polar bears,
and when it comes to business he arrests them impartially without
rancour and without indulgence. This explained what I had never been
able to understand in prison--how the convicted criminal seldom bears
malice against the detective who brought him to justice provided he
thinks that he was treated fairly. ‘The man was only doing his dooty,’
he says. The danger of over-educating your detective is that little
by little you will eliminate the ‘thief-catcher,’ for whom there is
a very definite place in the scheme. I remember one whose zeal had
communicated itself to his wife. At that time we were overwhelmed
with complaints about pickpockets at the stopping-places of the
’buses in the crowded hours. They would take part in the rush to get
in, crowding on with the other passengers and relieving them of the
contents of their pockets; if they were disappointed of a place, they
fell back and waited for the next ’bus to continue their business. If
they saw any one eyeing them they would mount the ’bus until they came
to a stopping-place where they thought they would be more free from
observation. My ‘thief-catcher’ was a rather conspicuous person, and
when he appeared on the scene the pickpockets would melt away. He could
not be everywhere at once, but he used to make a sort of ‘’busman’s
holiday’ of his days off duty and go out with his wife. She mounted
the ’bus with a gaping handbag, which was as effective a bait for a
pickpocket as roast pork is for a shark; the pickpocket followed, and
just behind him went the husband to take him into custody in the very
act. It must have been a quite exciting sport for both.

Every now and then the ‘thief-catcher’ would show a rare gleam of
imagination. I remember the case of a man who was expected to pledge
a stolen watch. It was impossible to search him until he did, because
if he had not got the watch in his possession he would ‘have the law
on you.’ The suspect vapoured about the railings of St. Mary Abbot’s
church, watched from the kerbstone by John Barker’s, where people are
always waiting for the motor-’bus. There was a pawnshop at the corner.
Suddenly he formed a resolution and walked quickly across the street to
the pawnshop, but the ‘thief-catcher’ was too quick for him. Flinging
off his coat as he went, he plunged into the shop, dashed behind the
counter, and received the suspect in his shirt-sleeves, resting on
his knuckles in the conventional style, and asked him what he could
do for him. ‘What will you give me on this?’ said the man, producing
the watch. ‘Come along to the police station and I’ll tell you, and I
caution you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you
at your trial.’ I have no doubt that the suspect said something which
was not fit to use in evidence when he realised what a trap he had
fallen into.

In one respect the Central Office was very much alive. Besides its
admirable system of identification by finger prints, elaborated by
Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner, a system since adopted by the
whole civilised world, it had a very complete and practical method of
record-keeping.

The late Dr. Mercier was responsible for the fallacy that there was
an almost invariable tendency on the part of criminals to repeat the
method in which they had been successful on a former enterprise. But a
glance at criminal histories shows that Dr. Mercier’s theory was only
partly true. Most of the practitioners vary their methods according to
local conditions. You will find the blackmailer taking an occasional
hand in a burglary; a pickpocket indulging in shop-lifting; an area
thief boldly breaking in through the front door. All that can be said
is that a man who has successfully poisoned a dog in one case is more
likely than another man to do the same again. The only successful
organisation in detecting crime must have method, industry, and local
knowledge, and I found all these strongly cultivated at New Scotland
Yard.

The London thief is preternaturally quick in detecting that he is being
followed. Even if he is not quite sure, he will adopt the expedient of
turning sharp on his heel and walking for fifty yards in the opposite
direction before resuming his journey, and during that fifty yards
his sharp eyes have taken a mental photograph of every person he has
passed. In really big affairs he will pay a confederate to follow him
at a distance, taking note of any other follower remotely resembling
a policeman. The tubes are very useful to him. He books for a long
journey, sits near the door, and slips out at the next station just
before the gates of the car are slammed and there is no time for the
policeman to alight, and having thus shaken him off, he sets off for
his real destination. Four well-known thieves tried this device once
with a pair of detectives in attendance. All went well up to the point
of slamming the gate, and then things began to go wrong. The detectives
had the gate reopened. The lift was one of those that are operated by
a liftman standing at the bottom, and as it went aloft the detective
explained the position to the liftman. Something went wrong with that
lift: it stuck half-way for quite five minutes--time enough for the
detectives to climb the stairs and summon uniformed policemen to man
the gates on the level of the street. The feelings of the trapped rat
who sees a group of terriers waiting for the wirework door of his cage
to be opened must have descended upon the spirits of those four thieves
when their cage rose at length to the surface.

Every now and then a detective would display real initiative in keeping
observation. In quiet suburban roads a loitering man would at once
bring a face to every window in the street. To keep watch upon a house
there must be some excuse. In one case the detective became a jobbing
gardener and undertook to clip the hedges and weed the paths of the
house opposite, and if he took a long time over the job, that is quite
in accordance with the habits of jobbing gardeners; in another, attired
in suitable clothing and armed with pick-axes, two detectives proceeded
to dig up the roadway. Their leisurely method of work must have
convinced the bystanders that they were genuine employés of the Borough
Surveyor.