THE SCALPEL OF SCOTLAND YARD: The Life Story of Sir Bernard Spilsbury

A professional rather than a personal biography, this still has a wide appeal in its true crime background. For Bernard Spilsbury, not particularly outstanding through his youth and school years, became a household word with his medical evidence in the Crippen case. His rise was unspectacular but his ability for close scrutiny, for pathological interpretation, his thoroughness and enormous background in post-mortems, made of him an infallible witness whose testimony was incorruptible. His career is backgrounded in a survey of the medical-criminal scene, which had been stigmatized before his time, in the steps that led him to his fame during his lifetime, in the passion for detail and exactitude that marked his medical progress at St. Mary's and as a collaborator with the C.I.D., and is fully explained in the detailed examination of the cases in which he gave evidence, both from court and the personal records he kept. Everything from poisonings, knives, guns, fire, dismemberings and trunk murders, on to the rare, motiveless and causeless crimes are part of his dossier and the whole is a factual record of the unshakable power of medical science in criminal cases. Practially a ""must"" for the serious follower of true detection.