Relics and Remains

In addition to the crime story itself, especially during the nineteenth century, the most notorious incidents commonly witnessed an aftermath during which relics of the event might be exhibited in museums such as Madame Tussauds.

Possibly Jack the Ripper did send letters and body-parts to the police and others to boost his (or less likely her) celebrity, but equally these might have been sent by hoaxers. Some offenders, however, did seek self-publicity, even some form of immortality, in writing memoirs which publishers were happy to print and members of the public were delighted to read for vicarious pleasure. Pierre-Frangois Lacenaire, guillotined in Paris for a double murder in 1836, was among the first and most striking of such individuals, but he was followed by a string of others, especially in the twentieth century. Sometimes the authors (though their books were invari­ably the work of ghost writers) sought to cash in on a popular image, such as George Smithson who called his autobiography Raffles in Real Life, seeking to echo E. J. Hornung's short stories of A. J. Raffles, celebrated cricketer and gentleman thief, or Billy Hill, a razor-wielding thug who claimed, in his book title, to be Boss of Britain's Underworld. Jacques Mesrine was equally boastful but possessed perhaps of a little more literary skill in writing his L'instinct de mort inside La Sante Prison and having it smuggled out shortly before he escaped. Mesrine died in a shoot-out with the gendarmerie in Paris in 1979; like Lacenaire, he has featured in cinematic versions of his life. The problem with being a killer who boasts some form of Robin Hood, anti-establishment persona is that such individuals have rarely lived to see themselves on celluloid. The Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano did not pen any romantic autobiography and was shot dead in 1950 after a career which some have described as Robin Hood-like, while others have seen him as the instrument of unscrupulous politicians and mafia leaders. Yet personally Giuliano was very conscious of how his image was projected and, since his death, he has been the subject of two films, directed respectively by Francesco Rosi in 1961 and Michael Cimino in 1987, a novel, The Sicilian, by Mario Puzo (1984) on which Cimino's film was based, and an opera by Lorenzo Ferrero (1985).