Books in Brief: A Detective’s Story: George Hatherill of Scotland Yard

A Detective’s Story: George Hatherill of Scotland Yard, by George Hatherill (McGraw-Hill, 199 pp., $6.95). “A mutilated body, a severed head or limb, or the body of someone who has been hanged or drowned, are not pleasant to look at: nor is it an agreeable task to take the fingerprints of a putrefying cadaver or attend an autopsy on the body of a child who has been raped and murdered: but after you have seen . . . such things a dozen times or more you come to accept them as being all part of the day’s work.” That’s the ho-humish tone in which Hatherill describes the investigation of criminal cases that made up his life’s work, a career he began as a beat-walking policeman and ended as commander of the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard, in charge of breaking the Great Train Robbery. There are times when you yearn for the novelist’s eye, as when Hatherill, on an international case, meets Hitler, Goering, and Himmler, is given a tour of Gestapo headquarters by Heydrich, and maddeningly provides us with no details. Nevertheless, despite the deliberate understatement, this is an invaluable book for anyone interested in the who-what-when-why-how aspects of law enforcement, useful to both amateur and professional criminologists, and bulging with enough cases to keep a mystery novelist in material for years.

JC

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J. R. Coyne Jr.

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A Detective’s Story: George Hatherill of Scotland Yard, by George Hatherill (McGraw-Hill, 199 pp., $6.95). “A mutilated body, a severed head or limb, or the body of someone who has been hanged or drowned, are not pleasant to look at: nor is it an agreeable task to take the fingerprints of a putrefying cadaver or attend an autopsy on the body of a child who has been raped and murdered: but after you have seen . . . such things a dozen times or more you come to accept them as being all part of the day’s work.” That’s the ho-humish tone in which Hatherill describes the investigation of criminal cases that made up his life’s work, a career he began as a beat-walking policeman and ended as commander of the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard, in charge of breaking the Great Train Robbery. There are times when you yearn for the novelist’s eye, as when Hatherill, on an international case, meets Hitler, Goering, and Himmler, is given a tour of Gestapo headquarters by Heydrich, and maddeningly provides us with no details. Nevertheless, despite the deliberate understatement, this is an invaluable book for anyone interested in the who-what-when-why-how aspects of law enforcement, useful to both amateur and professional criminologists, and bulging with enough cases to keep a mystery novelist in material for years.