Stephen Wade - Britains Most Notorious Prisoners. Victorian to Present-Day Cases

T he word notorious implies a high level of very doubtful and often disturbing fame; it refers to the kind of fame that most of us would wish to avoid. Yet, in the world of true crime, it often has a reversal of those implications, and that is not merely because of the often wrongful assumption that readers of the genre go to it for the unhealthy frisson of blood and suffering in the tale. In fact, history shows that notorious may imply all kinds of references, including the humorous and bizarre.

Notorious may be local, but also be so bizarre that the weirdness spreads across culture, as with the case of Allison Johnson, who stood in Lincoln Crown Court in 1992, charged with aggravated burglary. He was known across the prison establishment and beyond as the cutlery man because he tended to swallow knives, forks and spoons. Johnson was a repeat prisoner but actually spent more time on the operating table than in a pad. Peter Seddon, writing about the case, joked that as the man walked from court, he was severely rattled.

There are humorous and strange tales in this book, but often only incidentally. In a prison community in Britain, there is an unusual kind of humour, parallel in some ways to the canteen culture of those professions that deal with the less pleasant and normal side of life. It is hard but also somehow infantile, basic and sometimes witty and inventive. A notorious prisoner, in that context, can actually be an entertaining one, but that is something we have to understand in a way completely separate from his or her crimes. The truth is that a criminals life, if a long jail stretch is involved, is an odd mix of surreal adventure and crushingly tedious routine.

Of course, the stories here will not all be of this kind in the range of meanings of the word notorious. My tales include the prison lives of serial killers: terrifyingly deviant minds who need the fantasy in their sick imaginations to be lived out in a horrendous drama involving real and innocent victims. But, paradoxically to those who do not know a prison community, the two sit quite easily together: the crazy, entertaining and the horrible aspects can live together in that complex establishment, the prison.

Writing about prisoners invariably entails explaining prisons, so I begin with that explanation as a prelude to the stories. These stories also involve some crime history: I begin with some late Victorian cases simply because they are compelling stories, and then move into the more recent sensations of such guests of Her Majesty as Charles Bronson and Ian Brady. The Victorian and Edwardian stories necessarily bring together the shadow of the noose and the horrors of a prison system that was effectively compared to a miserable purgatory as sick and inhuman as anything in Dantes vision of that state of limbo. To be in a prison is to forget time, or at least to see it differently. But when the prisoner in question is Florence Maybrick, for example, waiting for the day when the hangman would call, it is a very different matter to that of the modern serial killer who, for whatever reasons, will rot in jail, but with regular meals, a well-stocked library at his disposal, and some of the wonders of the age of the machine.