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Books > Mystery > The Great Detective Case of 1877

The Great Detective Case of 1877

1552462005

Self Published

Stewart, Richard F.

$48.00

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On the 12th July 1877 the British public awoke to the startling news that three senior officers of the detective force at Scotland Yard had been arrested, charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Two months later a fourth detective was added to their number. Nathaniel Druscovich, William Palmer and George Clarke were chief inspectors and they comprised virtually the whole of the top echelon of the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police at that time. The fourth, John Meiklejohn, held the rank of inspector. Three were found guilty, one was acquitted, though his counsel later admitted that he did not believe him innocent. The story of the detectives’ downfall is the story of two turf swindlers, William Kurr and Harry Benson. With Kurr providing inside knowledge of the betting world and Benson the ability, literally, to translate this into persuasive circulars, the pair formed, in the words of a prosecuting counsel, ‘an intimate and deadly combination’. Between 1874 and 1876 they brought their ‘trade’ to new heights of ingenuity, with frauds operating across Europe with apparent impunity, culminating in the acquisition of £10,000 from a French countess, Mme de Goncourt. It was only their greed in trying to get the countess to invest even more money on a non-existent horse that led to their downfall – a downfall due to the persistence of her solicitor and in no way to the efforts of the Scotland Yard detectives on the case. Those gentlemen had long been in the swindlers’ pockets. Convicted in April 1877 to long terms of imprisonment, Kurr and Benson immediately began to inform on their erstwhile confederates, and the part sordid, part comic tale of the fall of Scotland Yard came out. The subsequent enquiry into the detective department led to the establishment in 1878 of a wholly reorganized detective branch – the Criminal Investigation Department, supposedly designed to forestall corruption. Its success can be judged by the fact that today the largest detective force at Scotland Yard is the Commissioner’s anti-corruption squad. Richard F. Stewart was born in Dundee in 1936 and educated at the University of St. Andrews. Ten years in the Royal Army Educational Corps were followed by twenty-five on the Administrative staff of the University of Manchester. In 1992 he made the best possible move - early retirement. He is the author of two other books – End Game (1999), a study of solutions to Edwin Drood, Dickens’ unfinished mystery, and & ...And Always A Detective (1980, reprinted 2000), an idiosyncratic history of detective fiction.

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