I am conscious that in arguing against the "more deadly than the male"
conception of the woman criminal I am perhaps doing my book no great
service. It might work for its greater popularity if I argued the
other way, making out that the subjects I have chosen were monsters
of brutality, with arms up to the shoulders in blood, that they were
prodigies of iniquity and cunning, without bowels, steeped in hypocrisy,
facinorous to a degree never surpassed or even equalled by evil men.
It may seem that, being concerned to strip female crime of the lurid
preeminence so commonly given it, I have contrived beforehand to rob
the ensuing pages of any richer savour they might have had. But I don't,
myself, think so.
If these women, some of them, are not greater monsters than their male
analogues, monsters they still remain. If they are not, others of them,
greater rogues and cheats than males of like criminal persuasion, cheats
and rogues they are beyond cavil. The truth of the matter is that I
loathe the use of superlatives in serious works on crime. I will read, I
promise you, anything decently written in a fictional way about 'master'
crooks, 'master' killers, kings, queens, princes, and a whole peerage of
crime, knowing very well that never yet has a 'master' criminal had
any cleverness but what a novelist gave him. But in works on crime that
pretend to seriousness I would eschew, pace Mr Leonard R. Gribble, all
'queens' and other honorifics in application to the lost men and women
with whom such works must treat. There is no romance in crime. Romance
is life gilded, life idealized. Crime is never anything but a sordid
business, demonstrably poor in reward to its practitioners.
But, sordid or not, crime has its human interest. Its practitioners are
still part of life, human beings, different from law-abiding humanity by
God-alone-knows-what freak of heredity or kink in brain convolution. I
will not ask the reader, as an excuse for my book, to view the criminal
with the thought attributed to John Knox:
"There, but for the Grace of God, goes ----" Because the phrase might as
well be used in contemplation of John D. Rockefeller or Augustus John or
Charlie Chaplin or a man with a wooden leg. I do not ask that you should
pity these women with whom I have to deal, still less that you should
contemn them. Something between the two will serve. I write the book
because I am interested in crime myself, and in the hope that you'll
like the reading as much as I like the writing of it.