Bedside Crime

THE CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CRIME AND CRIMINALS (351 pp.)--Edited by Sir Harold Scott--Hawthorn ($ 15).

In France, the judge may retire with the jury. In Britain not long ago, a man grew marijuana from birdseed. Cocaine was known during the Stone Age. High treason was so called to distinguish it from petty treason, i.e., a wife killing her husband.

Such bits are themselves the birdseed scattered through The Concise Encyclopedia of Crime and Criminals, the agreeable useless information that spices its usefulness. For the layman--though the specialist, whether on the bench or behind bars, may differ--the book commits no editorial high crimes, merely misdemeanors involving disproportion, inconsistency, British bias, together with some doubtless conscious sins of omission. If it fails to canvass its subject from A to Z (the last entry stops at Y), or from Lapland to Patagonia (it mostly treats Britain, the U.S. and Europe), or from hokus to strychnine (it wholly neglects weapons and poisons), its range is considerable, its writing often sprightly. Edited by a former chief of Scotland Yard, with contributors (almost all English) extending from Ian Fleming and J. Edgar Hoover to Alan Moorehead and Rebecca West, it boils down a huge vatful of material without losing too much of the original felonious flavor.

Velvet Swindle. The solidest and most serious entries in Crime and Criminals--juvenile delinquency, penology, prostitution, war crimes--exhibit a drab sociologist look and a stylistic prison pallor. But as a refresher course in big-name crime, the book often proves happily terse where there no longer can be much tension, yielding forgotten details into the bargain. Crippen, perhaps England's best-known wife murderer, was born in Michigan; Captain Kidd, most famous of pirates, probably was not a pirate at all but a legitimate privateer who got a bum rap from a British court. While the never-caught Jack the Ripper was terrifying London, Queen Victoria sent the Home Secretary directions as to how to catch him. Ruth Snyder, during her trial, received 164 proposals of marriage; Fatty Arbuckle weighed 16 1/2 Ibs. at birth.

In addition to these luminaries of malefaction, readers may meet such relative unknowns as High-Finance Crook Ernest Hooley, who used part of his ill-got gains to become the patron of twelve ecclesiastical livings for parish priests in rural England, or Leopold Harris, who was so great an expert on fraud that his prison cell became an office where he scrutinized documents for the British authorities. Or there is the Portuguese Bank Note Case of the 1920s, in which a band of smooth, velvety swindlers talked the Bank of Portugal's official printers--a posh British firm--into engraving 100 million escudos, next got permission from the Portuguese government to found a bank in Angola, where they put their escudos into circulation.

Maximum Penalty. The liveliest of the longer pieces deals with Prohibition, and John Bull has a field day with the U.S. v. John Barleycorn. Proffered bribes to a Prohibition agent ran as high as $300,000 a week; Al Capone's liquor take was $75 million a year. At the outset, the Department of Justice had no plans for handling Volstead Act violations; after the act had been in force for one month, the first open court date in New York State was three years off.

The book offers help on the more recherche crimes--dacoity ("armed robbery by five or more persons") or embracery (an attempt to corrupt or influence juries). It dallies in wordplay, both criminal and legal. An Englishman kicked off his boots on the gallows to disprove his mother's prophecy that he would die in them; a British judge, asked why he dubbed a certain barrister "Necessity," answered: "Because he knows no law." It corrects popular misconceptions: Bertillon, far from creating fingerprint identifications, was skeptical of their value. It shows how greatly writers can misconceive: Conan Doyle protested that developing character in detective stories could only endanger the plot. Perhaps its most unforgettable statement is a sentence concerning Scotland's High Court of Justiciary. "The maximum penalty which may be imposed in that court," says the article, "is death."

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