The International Underworld

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Philip Jenkins and Gary W. Potter, ‘Before the Krays: Organized Crime in London, 1920–1960’ Criminal Justice History 9 (1988) pp 209–30. Reference to the ‘third-degree’ methods by police was, as John Carter Wood explains, part of the broader cultural influence of America on Britain.Google Scholar

John Carter Wood, ‘“The Third Degree”: Press Reporting, Crime Fiction and Police Powers in 1920s Britain’ Twentieth Century British History 21 (2010) pp 464–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, Cinema, Literature and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1987) pp 163–79. That said, film-makers were a rather cosmopolitan lot. German émigrés brought about a German influence on American films; this was particularly evident in the ‘film noir’ genre.Google Scholar

Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and the ‘New Objectivity’ (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p 19.Google Scholar

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See, further, Sari Kawana, ‘Mad Scientists and Their Prey: Bioethics, Murder and Fiction in Interwar Japan’ Journal of Japanese Studies 31 (2005) pp 89–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Florentine Strzelczyk, ‘Motors and Machines, Robots and Rockets: Harry Piel and Sci-Fi Film in the Third Reich’ German Studies Review 24 (2004) p 549. Heather Wolffram suggests that experiments with ‘criminal telepathy’ (asking a clairvoyant for help in cracking unsolved cases) was consistent with, rather than contradictory of, efforts to professionalise through science. To some extent, it also signified a certain ambiguity or ambivalence about scientific knowledge.Google Scholar

Heather Wolffram, ‘Crime, Claivoyance and the Weimar Police’ Journal of Contemporary History 44 (2009) pp 581–601.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Sheldon Glueck, Continental Police Practice in the Formative Years (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1974; originally, 1926). The story of technology and crime was bigger, claimed Richard Enright, formerly commissioner of police in New York City, than immigration and crime. Enright urged the public to forget the ‘fallacious theory that the majority of our crimes are perpetuated by the so-called foreign element’. Truth told, the foreign element kept within the law to about the same degree as citizens from families that had been in America for generations. ‘We need to modernize our whole view of the problem,’ he urged, for we are dealing with the most modern businessman… The criminal of today takes full advantage of every discovery and invention of his time no less than any other industrial operative in this fiercely competitive age’. See Richard E. Enright, ‘Our Biggest Business—Crime’ North American Review 228 (1929) p 388.Google Scholar

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F. Sempkins, Poverty and Prostitution: Unemployment and Prostitution of Young Girls (London: British Social Hygiene Council, 1935) p 32.Google Scholar

P.W. Wilson, ‘Criminal Law Enforcement in America and Europe’ Current History 27 (1927) p 830.Google Scholar

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See further Philip Jenkins, ‘The Radicals and the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1890–1930’ Criminology 20 (1982) pp 347–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Alice Goldfarb Marquis, ‘Written on the Wind: The Impact of Radio during the 1930s’ Journal of Contemporary History 19 (1984) p 411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Elena Razlogova, ‘True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network Broadcasting, 1935–1946’ American Quarterly, p 142.Google Scholar

George Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’ in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950) pp 197–202.Google Scholar

Chris Waters, ‘Beyond “Americanization”: Rethinking Anglo-American Cultural Exchange Between the Wars’ Cultural and Social History 4 (2007) pp 451–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Andrew Davies, ‘The Scottish Chicago? From “Hooligans” to “Gangsters” in Inter-War Glasgow’ Cultural and Social History 4 (2007) pp 511–27. British cities were not the only European cities said to have fallen prey to American criminality. During the 1930s, the incidence of burglaries, robberies, violence and illegality in Barcelona led to the nickname the ‘Catalan Chicago’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Christopher Ealham, ‘Anarchism and Illegality in Barcelona, 1931–7’ Contemporary European History 4 (1995) pp 133–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Alexander McArthur, No Mean City (London: Longmans, 1935) pp 138, 323.Google Scholar

Percy Sillitoe, Cloak without Dagger (London: Quality Book Club, 1955), p 65. Other authorities adopted Sillitoe’s tactic. Judge Macardie, who levied sentences against several gang members for a razor attack on police, invited a police constable to comment on the gang violence. The constable testified that during the past two years there had been no fewer than ten ‘gang attacks’ on police and private citizens. This sort of violence seemed to be prevalent in the rising generation, particularly those between 17 and 30 years of age. ‘A Menace’ Yorkshire Telegraph and Star 10 December 1926, p 1.Google Scholar

Quoted in J.P. Bean, The Sheffield Gang Wars (Sheffield: D and D Publications, 2009) p 125.Google Scholar

Henry T.F. Rhodes, The Criminals We Deserve (London: Methuen, 1937) pp 183–4, 234.Google Scholar

Ruth Bowley, ‘Amusements and Entertainment’ in H. Llewellyn Smith, The New Survey of London Life and Labour, vol 9 (London: King and Son, 1935) pp 44–6.Google Scholar

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Christopher Shannon, ‘Public Enemies, Local Heroes: The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema’ New Hibernia Review 9 (2005) pp 48–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Quoted in Siân Nicholas, ‘News, Current Affairs and the Limits of Anglo-American Exchange in Inter-War Britain’ Cultural and Social History 4 (2007) p 464.Google Scholar

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Cyril Burt, The Young Delinquent (London: University of London Press, 1925) p 143.Google Scholar

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Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Heinemann, 1938) pp 84–8. In later editions, Colleoni becomes Italian. Curiously, there is a Guglielmo Ceccolini in one of Russell Pasha’s published reports. In 1931, Russell Pasha describes his breaking up of a smuggling ring involving Greek and Egyptian gangs led by Ceccolini, a steward aboard the Lloyd Trestino liner Victoria.Google Scholar

Donald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p 262.Google Scholar

Martha F. Lee, ‘Nesta Webster: The Voice of Conspiracy’ Journal of Women’s History 17 (2005) p 92. During her study of a romance involving two French aristocrats, she became convinced she had personally experienced the French Revolution. She leaned toward the Buddhist view of reincarnation, and eventually came to believe she was the reincarnation of one of the subjects in her first ‘nonfiction’ book, the Comtesse de Sabran.Google Scholar

Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1936) pp 393, 397.Google Scholar

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Basil Thomson, My Experiences at Scotland Yard (New York: Doubleday, 1923) pp 319–20.Google Scholar

See Gisela Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1978) pp 13–28.Google Scholar

Charles Coughlin, Money: Questions and Answers (National Union for Social Justice, 1936) pp 76, 160, 170.Google Scholar

James Shenton, ‘The Coughlin Movement and the New Deal’ Political Science Quarterly 73 (1958) pp 352–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Boris Brasol, ‘Foundations of Criminology’ Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 17 (1926) pp 13–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Boris Brasol, ‘Institute of Scientific Criminology’ American Journal of Police 1 (1930) pp 100–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Boris Brasol, Crime, Criminology and Criminological Institutes (Vizianagaram City, India: Andhra Research University, 1938) pp 8–9. Copy in the British Library, London.Google Scholar

Boris Brasol, Socialism and Civilization (New York: Charles Schribner’s, 1920) pp 114, 163, 189.Google Scholar

Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life (London: Bodley Head, 2009) pp 69–70.Google Scholar