Cornish...of the Yard

It's nice when friends get the attention they deserve: our copy of the London Review of Books arrived today, and what should I find but a review by John Pemble of The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England by Haia Shpayer-Makov.

Having long been an admirer of Haia's work (like this co-edited collection here), I'm very much looking forward to reading her book, which in some ways can be seen as describing one important part of the pre-history of the Pace case: the rise of the detective. 

By the inter-war period, the mystique around those magical words 'Scotland Yard' was fairly firmly in place, and there was something of a craze for detectives' memoirs in the period.

Among them we would find one by Chief Inspector George Cornish, the lead detective in the Pace case.

Here is he is, rather living up to the image of the detective, I would think.

This image comes from his autobiography, Cornish of the ‘Yard’: His Reminiscences and Cases (London: John Lane, 1935).

We'll be hearing more about him, don't worry.