True crime among the Tudors

The original Double Indemnity

At the start of my week of posts about Lord Lucan - and thank you again for the wonderful feedback - I wrote an introductory piece about the true crime genre: its voguishness, but also the tenacity of its appeal. True crime, I declaimed, can never be ‘over’, because it is about human nature writ large, and thus can never not be interesting,

A few days later I read a feature stating that true crime was over. Yes indeed. Apparently it had been replaced by ‘cosy crime’. The argument seemed to rest upon the popularity of the BBC television series Ludwig, whose accidental detective is a crossword compiler who wears corduroy jackets, and is therefore cosy. In other words. it was one of those features based on not very much at all.

Cosy crime and true crime are not opposites, nor indeed mutually exclusive. To suggest that they are makes a kind of category error. There are so many ways of telling true crime stories, from In Cold Blood to Mr Whicher to ITV’s Until I Kill You to my Lucan book to the recent Lucan documentary, which at the moment is the first thing that you see if you go on the BBC iplayer (suggesting that an appetite for such stories remains good and healthy). They are not always about blood and guts and autopsies. In fact the best of them are about far more than that.

And this proclamation that cosy crime is back in fashion…. forgive me, but when it did it ever go out?

I have long resented the application of the word ‘cosy’ to Agatha Christie, whose worldliness always strikes me as bracingly steely, but the term serves to describe something that we understand: the oddly pleasurable juxtaposition of murder and Ovaltine/warming whisky/log fires etc. Ludwig is merely the latest iteration of this formula. And it has never - to my mind - lost its popularity, not even when comparable newspaper features were being written about Scandi-noir, and how viewers were fleeing the artistic construct of St Mary Mead for hyper-real Copenhagen (although, even then, there is something of cosiness, since at the root of that reassuring sensation is: this isn’t happening to me).

As for the true crime genre: not only is it (again to my mind) indestructible, it has been around for a very long time. It is ninety years since F. Tennyson Jesse published A Pin to See the Peepshow, still among the best of its kind, a fictional take on the story of Edith Thompson and her lover Freddy Bywaters (about which I have written often on here), hanged in 1923 for the murder of her husband.

And more than four centuries have passed since an anonymous dramatist – or dramatists, one of whom may have been Shakespeare – wrote Arden of Faversham, a play first published in 1592, which I have never seen but have always longed to stage. How amazing that would be. The RSC has done it a couple of times in the not-too-distant past: the image at the top of this post is of Jenny Agutter, back in the early eighties, in the lead role of Alice Arden. I bet she was wonderful. That quality of innocent beguiling eroticism… exactly right.

The story, of a 1551 murder, is pure domestic-noir. It is also the stuff of ballads and pamphlets: the origins of the true crime genre. The play’s formal source is said to be good old Holinshed, although no doubt the facts were widely known within ye olde M25; they are summarized, thus, in the title page of the first quarto:

The lamentable and true tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham in Kent. Who was most wickedly murdered by the means of his disloyal and wanton wife who, for the love she bore to one Mosby, hired two desperate ruffians, Black Will and Shakebag, to kill him. Wherein is showed the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the insatiable desire of filthy lust and the shameful end of all murderers.

That’s telling them.

And this is the house - formerly a guest-house attached to a Benedictine abbey - in which Thomas Arden, a successful Tudor businessman, was murdered. The culprits were his wife, Alice, and her lover Richard Mosby, a sexy lowlife (I see peak period Sean Bean): a classic case of joint enterprise, just as the Thompson-Bywaters case was said to be.

The couple wanted rid of Arden, and they wanted his money. It happened almost five hundred years ago, but it could be happening today. Hence the image below, of the 2014 RSC production (Sharon Small as Alice), which brought the whole thing into the here-and-now. I never quite know if modern dress works - it erases a lot of clichés, but some mysterious heft can also be lost. Nevertheless the point is clear: true crime is timeless. Divorce on demand notwithstanding, the domestic murder does not die.