Author: Alan Moss and Keith Skinner
ISBN No: 1 903365 88 0
Review date: 17/12/2025
No of pages: 191
Publisher: National Archives
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
A book about Dr Crippen and Jack the Ripper cannot go far wrong.
Scotland Yard Files: Milestones in Criminal Detection details those and many other crimes, based on Scotland Yard records now in The National Archives at Kew, west London. DNA may well have solved those ‘Whitechapel murders’ of 1888, which take up only one of 12 chapters. Otherwise, the authors – retired Metropolitan Police chief superintendent Alan Moss and crime historian Keith Skinner – use murder cases to show how methods developed – identification parades, fingerprints, ballistics evidence, use of dental evidence, and ever-faster communications, from the telegram to ship’s radio that trapped Crippen to Police 5 appeals on TV. The tools of a detective may have changed over the years, and some of the fascination of the book is finding origins of things we take for granted. That telling phrase ‘help police with their inquiries’ dates from 1948, for example. This book is a good read for anyone who cannot resist a ‘good’ detective story. Most impressive is the work by the first Met detectives, using the first railways to attend murder cases that locals could not solve, before telephones or any of the tools we rely on. And yet these Victorians were pioneers as much as any detective today using the internet and forensics.
What is striking – and a cause for pride in the Met, hence the foreword by Commissioner Ian Blair – is that London’s police force in 1829 was starting from almost zero. As criminals have become ever more ingenious, so have the ways of catching them. One finishes the book marvelling at the advances in detection but feeling that CCTV, DNA and who knows what in the future will somehow never prove to be the magic solution.
