“What thrill at the theatre or cinema compares with the excitement of attending a criminal trial, of beholding in the flesh the man or woman who may be guilty of some secret or bloody deed, and watching, half fearful, half shrinking, the great game played by judge and counsel with the accused’s life as stake?” So wrote Harry Hodge in his introduction to the first edition of Penguin’s Famous Trials series, launched in 1941 at the height of the Second World War.
The trials Hodge chose to introduce the series were of notorious cases from the preceding several decades: Madeleine Smith, the 21-year-old Scottish beauty charged in 1857 at the high court in Edinburgh with poisoning her lover; Dr Crippen, accused in 1910 of murdering his wife and fleeing the country with his lover, Ethel Le Neve, disguised as a boy. “All Great Britain was agitated over the trial,” wrote Hodge of the Smith case, which ended in the Scots law verdict of “not proven”.
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