It is a central thesis of this book that many ostensible facts in the Crippen drama are inseparable from a matrix of literary, criminological, and journalistic tropes that shaped its reception in Edwardian imagination and posterity. As later chapters will demonstrate, the case resonated deeply with earlier crimes. It exhibited, in Orwell's phrase, a ‘family resemblance’ to an established group of Victorian-Edwardian crime sensations – pattern texts which had left an abiding imprint upon the popular imagination. As we shall see, it is possible to imagine that these criminological forebears even shaped the contours of the story, with the concealment of a body in the cellar and the fugitive's flight in transgressive disguise revealed as established motifs in the shared inheritance of crime stories which preceded Crippen. Add to this mix the medico-legal speculation as to what really took place at 39 Hilldrop Crescent (Crippen maintained a dogged silence until the end), and the lines between fact and fiction are truly blurred.

To peel away the resulting grand guignol filter from the plain facts can be a challenge. Even within the official documents, including the imposing Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and Central Criminal Court files held at the National Archives, this interpenetration of criminological, literary, and journalistic discourses is apparent. For example, a significant portion of one of the Home Office files is given over to Home Secretary Winston Churchill's mission to expose the professional malpractice of Crippen's solicitor, Arthur Newton, who spread rumours of a Crippen confession and fed the press apocryphal exclusives from the condemned man's cell. Likewise, another official dossier among the police papers is effectively a scrapbook of Crippen curios. Bringing together a substantial array of press cuttings, the book collates not only trial coverage but such legacy cuttings as a 1926 article on a visit to London of spiritualist medium Etta Bledsoe, whose ‘name became known in this country some years ago by reason of her warning to the notorious murderer, Dr Crippen’. Even these most sober of archival sources thus reflect how the lines between documentary record and imaginative elaboration of the Crippen legend were blurred from the beginning.