[TENNYSON JESSE, F. (1888–1958) – her copy]; MITCHELL, Charles Ainsworth (1867–1948)

Science and the Criminal

London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd, 1911

8vo; pp. 240, [23, ads], frontispiece. Very good condition: binding slightly fragile, spine a little faded but internally excellent, noting only some minor spotting to the prelims

With the bookplate of ‘Fryn’ Tennyson Jesse, the crime writer, playwright, journalist, novellist and poet. Born Wynifried Margaret Jesse, ‘Fryn’ adopted her unusual name in part as a whimsical play on ‘Wynifried’, and, via her father, as an homage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, her great uncle.

At school she became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes; in 1911, the year this book was published, she moved to London to become a journalist. Harold Child of The Times took her on, and she also quickly began publishing short stories – her first, ‘The Mask’, becoming a successful play under the title ‘Black Mask’. An aeroplane injury interrupted her career, until she returned to work with war reports, especially focusing on the plight of women at or near the front lines.

Murder and Its Motives, published in 1924, was to become her enduring work: it is an analytical study of the motives for murder – identifying gain, revenge, elimination, jealousy, conviction and lust for killing as the six categories of the crime. This book is seen as a landmark in the ‘true crime’ genre, and prefigures later criminological theories of crime. Following Murder and Its Motive, Tennyson Jesse was invited to write introductions for the Notable British Trials series, cementing her reputation as a crime writer.

Her experience of true crime lies behind Tennyson Jesse’s classic crime novel A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), which has been republished many times since its first appearance.