One hears and reads, however, a great deal about the sense of power which gradually steals upon the poisoner.It is a speculation upon which I am not ready to argue.There is, indeed, chapter and verse for believing that poisoners have arrived at a sense of omnipotence.But if Anna Zwanziger (here I quote from Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry's essay on her in his Twenty Human Monsters), a day or two before the execution, smiled and said it was a fortunate thing for many people that she was to die, for had she lived she would have continued to poison men and women indiscriminately''; if, still according to the same writer, when the arsenicwas found on her person after the arrest, she seized the packet and gloated over the powder, looking at it, the chronicler assures us, as a woman looks at her lover''; and if, when the attendants asked her how she could have brought herself calmly to kill people with whom she was living--whose meals and amusements she shared--she replied that their faces were so stupidly healthy and happy that she desired to see them change into faces of pain and despair,'' I will say this in no way goes to prove the woman criminal to be more deadly than the male.This ghoulish satisfaction, with the conjectured feeling of omnipotence, is not peculiar to the woman poisoner.Neill Cream had it.Armstrong had it.Wainewright, with his reason for poisoning Helen Abercrombie--Upon my soul I don't know, unless it was that her legs were too thick''--is quite on a par with Anna Zwanziger.The supposed sense of power does not even belong exclusively to the poisoner.Jack the Ripper manifestly had something of the same idea about his use of the knife.
As a monster in mass murder against Mary Ann Cotton I will set you the Baron Gilles de Rais, with his forty flogged, outraged, obscenely mutilated and slain children in one of his castles alone--his total of over two hundred children thus foully done to death.I will set you Gilles against anything that can be brought forward as a monster in cruelty among women.
Against the hypocrisy of Helene Jegado I will set you the sanctimonious Dr Pritchard, with the nauseating entry in his diary (quoted by Mr Roughead) recording the death of the wife he so cruelly murdered:
March 1865, 18, Saturday.Died here at 1 A.M.Mary Jane, my own beloved wife, aged thirty-eight years.No torment surrounded her bedside --but like a calm peaceful lamb of God passed Minnie away.May God and Jesus, Holy Ghost, one in three, welcome Minnie! Prayer on prayer till mine be o'er; everlasting love.Save us, Lord, for Thy dear Son!
Against the mean murders of Flanagan and Higgins I will set you Mr Seddon and Mr Smith of the brides in the bath.''
I am conscious that in arguing against the more deadly than the male'' conception of the woman criminal I am perhaps doing my book no great service.It might work for its greater popularity if I argued the other way, making out that the subjects I have chosen were monsters of brutality, with arms up to the shoulders in blood, that they were prodigies of iniquity and cunning, without bowels, steeped in hypocrisy, facinorous to a degree never surpassed or even equalled by evil men.It may seem that, being concerned to strip female crime of the lurid preeminence so commonly given it, I have contrived beforehand to rob the ensuing pages of any richer savour they might have had.But I don't, myself, think so.
If these women, some of them, are not greater monsters than their male analogues, monsters they still remain.If they are not, others of them, greater rogues and cheats than males of like criminal persuasion, cheats and rogues they are beyond cavil.The truth of the matter is that I loathe the use of superlatives in serious works on crime.I will read, I promise you, anything decently written in a fictional way about `master' crooks, `master' killers, kings, queens, princes, and a whole peerage of crime, knowing very well that never yet has a `master' criminal had any cleverness but what a novelist gave him.But in works on crime that pretend to seriousness I would eschew, pace Mr Leonard R.Gribble, all`queens' and other honorifics in application to the lost men and women with whom such works must treat.There is no romance in crime.Romance is life gilded, life idealized.Crime is never anything but a sordid business, demonstrably poor in reward to its practitioners.
But, sordid or not, crime has its human interest.Its practitioners are still part of life, human beings, different from law-abiding humanity by God-alone-knows-what freak of heredity or kink in brain convolution.I will not ask the reader, as an excuse for my book, to view the criminal with the thought attributed to John Knox:
There, but for the Grace of God, goes ----'' Because the phrase might as well be used in contemplation of John D.Rockefeller or Augustus John or Charlie Chaplin or a man with a wooden leg.I do not ask that you should pity these women with whom I have to deal, still less that you should contemn them.Something between the two will serve.
I write the book because I am interested in crime myself, and in the hope that you'll like the reading as much as I like the writing of it.
