A Great Policeman
Reminiscences by an Ex-Detective. By Francis Carlin. (Hutchinson and Co. 18s. net.) REMINISCENCES of great detectives are always interesting, and Messrs. Hutchinson are to be congratulated on getting
the late Superintendent of Scotland Yard to " write up " for them some of his more important cases. Mr. Carlin, we are told, was one of the so-called " Big Four " of Scotland Yard, and is himself largely responsible for the present organization of the C.I.D.
The book consists of a large number of chapters each devoted to a separate case, and therefore reads rather like a book of detective stories. Indeed, if one compares this book of actual cases with works of fiction, the impression one receives is that, contrary to popular supposition, truth is by no means stranger than fiction. Most of the murders, robberies, and forgeries here related are decidedly commonplace. The criminal commits early in the story some unforgivable piece of folly which even the least adroit detective—of the type the late Sherlock Holmes so often met—could hardly fail to recognize and use.
Mr. Carlin writes of "master minds" in the case of the Fisher forgers, when he had to deal with educated people who did not commit the more obvious and damning blunders, but the average criminal is evidently of poor mental ability ! The author adopts the attitude of a big-game hunter to his work, making a sport of it, as he is, of course, well entitled to do. His joy is to track down the human quarry and to secure condign punishment for the guilty.
Of his first case he writes :—" I spotted him lowering a bun- dle from a window. I waited in the shadows, and as soon as he touched the ground himself, I went for him. Can you understand my satisfaction when he got five years' penal servitude from the celebrated Justice Hawkins ? " After- wards, larger game could alone satisfy, and anything short of the death sentence made him feel that his labours were incom- plete. " Weeks—sometimes months—have been spent by me in weaving the net which was to surround such murderers as, say, the perpetrators of the Eltham affair or the Brixton taxicab crime, and then, when I stood in Court and heard the completion of my labours in the form of the death sentence being passed, I would walk out to take up straight away the tangled skein of a large robbery, such as the Berkeley Hotel £8,000 case, in which a night porter was nearly done to death by a gang, or the long and involved affair of the forgeries of an American millionaire's signature to cheques."
He would evidently like to see the law altered so that it would be easier for the police to secure convictions. " Within my own experience of cases which I have conducted myself there are several where the criminal, known to me and to others in the C.I.D., is walking about Britain to-day a free man, simply because as the law of the country stands his crime could not be brought home to him." The maxim that the onus of incontrovertible proof must remain with the prosecu- tion does not appeal to him. But it must not be supposed that the book is uninteresting. It is far from being dull. The two chapters on Scotland Yard give one a clear picture of police methods, and his chapter on the criminal mind, while not perhaps of importance to the psychologists, is of interest to the average reader as showing how a great detective regards the people against whom he matches his wits.
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