Drudgery of Detection

CORNISH OF SCOTLAND YARD--G. W. Cornish--Macmillan ($2).

Detective story addicts to whom the solving of crimes is a task essentially romantic last week found little romance in the memoirs of onetime Superintendent of Scotland Yard George W. Cornish. To professional sleuths crime detection is work like any other, hard, slow, tedious. Cornish of Scotland Yard is enlightening for its revelation of day-to-day police routine, its honest avoidance of spurious melodrama.

Forty years ago Detective Cornish, a stolid, hard-working country boy, entered Scotland Yard, trained for three weeks before being sent out to the dives and alleys of crime-ridden Whitechapel. There was no romance, little excitement about the first murder case on which he worked: two thugs killed foolish little Emily Farmer while robbing her tobacco shop, were discovered after a systematic check of all suspicious characters in the neighborhood.

Detective Cornish had been in Scotland Yard 18 years before he worked on a case that fitted the pattern of detective fiction. Portly "Cammi" Grizzard was a brilliant and resourceful man, a Jewish diamond merchant, notorious receiver of stolen goods, kindly leader of a large and loyal organization of thieves and spies. But police could not get evidence against him. Once his house was raided while he was dining the buyers of a stolen necklace; police found nothing, because "Cammi" dropped the necklace in his soup, calmly went on with his dinner. But when in 1913 "Cammi" Grizzard stole the Mayer pearls, worth -L-123,000, he had to depend on unreliable allies to help dispose of them, and loud-mouthed Leisir Gutwirth gave him away. Amateur Detectives Brandstatter and Quadratstein led Gutwirth on, posed as buyers until they got in touch with Scotland Yard. Coached by detectives, a French diamond merchant carried on intricate negotiations with the thieves, bargained and made conditions of sales like a diplomat at a peace conference. "Cammi" Grizzard distrusted the merchant, the merchant distrusted the police, and, as "Cammi" evaded one trap after another, the police began to distrust their own agents. After "Cammi" Grizzard spotted four Scotland Yard men at a place where the jewels were to be transferred, he set his spies to shadowing the detectives. Scotland Yard set more detectives to shadow "Cammi's" spies, until long processions of spies and counterspies followed each other through the streets of London. When "Cammi" was finally caught a nearby detective was artfully disguised as a uniformed policeman.

Unlike France's Franc,ois Eugene Vidocq, who packed his memoirs with accounts of his love affairs and daring escapes and thus inspired Conan Doyle, Poe, Hugo, Balzac and Gaboriau, Superintendent Cornish seldom refers to his personal career and accomplishments, writes of plodding, methodical, routine work unlikely to fire any man of letters. Always conscious of the elaborate organization needed to collect the countless items of trivia used in building up a case, Cornish gives himself and other super-sleuths no more credit than plain constables or voluntary informants, writes as much of murders that were never solved as of those that were. The work of running down false clues was as important and tedious as the more showy labor of capture and arrest. When the body of Minnie Bonati was discovered, in the Charing Cross Trunk Murder Case, days were wasted tracing the movements of an innocent man who happened to have bought a trunk strap on the day of the murder.

To Superintendent Cornish, with his attention firmly fixed on convictions, the drudgery of detective work was more important than individual brilliance; confessions were better than the most artful chains of circumstantial evidence; medical analysis was tricky and unreliable, since doctors often disagreed. Greatest anticlimax of Cornish's professional career came when a young signboard fixer named Field confessed to the murder of Norah Upchurch. Scotland Yard had only circumstantial evidence against Field, suspected when Norah Upchurch's body was first discovered, and the coroner's jury returned a verdict of murder against some person unknown. No progress had been made until Field dramatically confessed. Brought to trial he played hob with the conventions of murder mysteries by repudiating his confession, explaining that he had made it simply to force a trial and silence the suspicion from which he had suffered. He was promptly acquitted and the murder remained unsolved.

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