A Tabloid Story by Jan Needle

In the never-ending search for an honest living as a writer, I have wandered down many byways. Most recently, having written a novella about a particularly gruesome murder, I decided to show it to a few chosen intimates to give me some idea of if it was any good or not.

It's called The Blood Hound, and even that title was given to me by one of those intimates. It's based on a true series of events which took place in Blackburn, Lancashire, in the 1870s. A little girl called Emily disappeared one afternoon after having been given a prize for excellence at her local school.

On her way home she was called across the street by a man, who asked her to go and collect some tobacco for him from a local shop. She knew him, and he gave her the money for the purchase, then went back into his barbershop to wait for her. She was seven.

At home, her parents became worried when her father came home from the mill where he worked, but Emily had still not returned. He went to the police, there was a search, and nothing at all was found.

The police were very good about it, and next day issued Missing Person notices and searched the surrounding area. Nothing.

It was almost fair time in Blackburn, and the town was full of itinerant entertainers, as well as the myriad navvies and ex-navvies who had built the railways and canal – many of whom, of course, were Irish. It would not have taken much to make the place explode.

There were no actual witnesses to the murder or the immediate lead up to it, but several little girls had seen a tramp on a corner near the barbershop, and claimed that he had sent the girl to collect the 'bacca.' You can maybe guess the rest.

There was no mass media in those days, but they did have an alarming number of local newspapers, an extraordinary number of railway lines through the town, and a veritable army of balladeers and chapbook men. Very soon the town was seething with rubberneckers and wild opinions. The barber, strangely, was not fingered as a suspect for many days.

Before that, at least ten tramps were arrested on one day alone, and many more itinerants fled the area. The strongest suspect was seized in a distant county – those railways again – because the girls remembered their man had broken clogs. He was brought back to Blackburn, probably to be lynched.

You can keep it too light. But my proper pics wouldn't download

Except he wasn't. Because a lively opportunist from Preston brought his dog all the way to Blackburn when he read about the murder, and persuaded the police (Mr Chief Constable Potts) that it was a bloodhound and would find out the dreadful truth. The dog, Morgan, was only half bloodhound, and when set on in the woods where part of Emily's body had been found, came up with nothing.

But by this time, local opinion had turned against the barber (who was a tiny, damaged man of twenty-four) and the bloodhound was taken to his shop. It was the first time in England, apparently, that a bloodhound had been used to find a murdered body. Normally, they just hunted runaways.

It took Morgan no time at all. After sniffing round the bottom floor he shot upstairs and almost jammed himself inside the chimney. Where very shortly, Emily's half-burned skull was found. The police saved the barber from the baying crowd, so that he could be hanged with proper decency.

It was the luridness of the newspaper accounts and broadside ballads that gave me my problem. The crime, as delineated, was so appalling, so utterly brutal, that I felt my story had to start with it. Unvarnished. But I thought I might be wrong.

To cut a long story short (if not my problem), it's now been read by six people who are ‘fans’ and friends. And guess what. Half of them think my approach is dead right, and the other half think it borders on disgusting – and more importantly, puts them off reading beyond the first two chapters.

My intention, and my hope, was this: to show a vile crime, then follow it by going into the barber's mind to try and understand why he might have done it. His wife, the mother of his children, forgave him. There was a public subscription to keep them from the poor house. Not, one fears, what would have happened in our more enlightened times?

He was a sad wee man, barely five feet tall, who had been given to the parish as an undernourished toddler, and who fell off the workhouse roof onto his head when aged eleven.

There’s my quandary, sensation seekers. What to do?

PS I had a pic of the 'bloodhound' and the murderer, but the computer said no. Sorry.

PPS Just finished the account by G.A.Jones ('honest George') of his 'pleasure trip' to the Baltic by motor boat the month before Britain and Germany went to war. It is understated, funny, moving, and original. Just like Julia's own writing. She is, of course, his daughter. I honestly can't recommend it highly enough. It's called The Cruise of Naromis, and it's from Golden Duck and on Amazon.