Books: Chronicles of Crime

VILLAINY DETECTED (243 pp.)—Edited by Lillian de la Torre—Appleton-Century ($3).

This is a collection of engaging and often touching chronicles of crime in an age (1660-1800) when a petty theft could send an Englishman to the gallows. Editor de la Torre’s scholarship is graced with gusto that sometimes falls into archness, but her selections are almost all first-rate. Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift are among the old pamphleteers and balladeers represented; later hands include George Borrow and the Edinburgh lawyer, William Roughead, whom many connoisseurs consider the dean of crime writers. Neither police nor detectives in the modern sense existed in the 18th Century. Parish constables were amateurs serving a term, and parish watchmen were aged criers, of small use in chasing or collaring villains. Novelist Henry Fielding, while a magistrate, founded London’s “Bow Street runners” to pursue criminals— the catch being that the criminal had to be reported before he got out of sight. The professional “thief taker” was not a public official but a shady individual who made a business of collecting rewards.

Footpads, pickpockets and housebreakers, with all the riffraff who lived by their wits, filled the underworld of London’s alleys and gin shops with an argot of which traces still survive. “Frisking” meant searching, then as now. A watch was a “tick,” a handkerchief was a “wipe,” and “wipe priggers” (pickpockets) flourished among theater standees. A glass of gin was a “flash of lightning’,, and too many flashes often lit the way to “Tuck ’em Fair” (the place of execution).

Highwaymen, whose offense made them liable to gibbeting, were the heroes of low life throughout the period. Swift immortalized one such “knight of the pad” in his ballad, Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged:

As clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling, Rode stately through Holborn to die at his calling, He stopt at the George for a bottle of sack, And promis’d to pay for it when he came back. . . .

Swift Nicks, another highwayman “invented and perpetrated,” according to Miss de la Torre, “the first faked alibi on record.” He robbed a gentleman at Gad’s Hill near London at 4 in the morning, and by hard riding reached York (180 miles away) in the afternoon; “put off his Boots and riding Cloaths, and went dress’d as if be had been an Inhabitant of the Place to the Bowling-green,” where he asked the Lord Mayor what time it was. Later a jury acquitted him, on his lordship’s swearing to his alibi. King Charles II, hearing of this exploit, graciously congratulated the hero.