The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana
by Jess Nevins
The Waters Mysteries (1849-1862)
copyright © Jess Nevins 2022
The Waters Mysteries were written by “Waters” and first appeared in “The Gambler’s Revenge” (Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, July 28, 1849). “Waters” was probably the pseudonym of William Russell (?-?). It is known that Russell died before 1900 and that he had more than a passing familiarity with the procedures of the London police, but little else is known about him.
Waters is a gambler who through dreadful circumstance and financial ruin is forced to join the London police force. He has no other alternatives but the police to earn a living, and his beloved wife Emily is depending on him. Once on the force he discovers that he is a capable policeman. In his first case, involving a rich young man being swindled by gamblers, Waters is lucky; the man behind the swindle is the man who ruined Waters. Waters is able to capture his old “friend,” which starts his career off nicely. Waters is not always successful; in one interesting case he is duped first by the con man he is pursuing and then by the wife and father-in-law of the con man. But generally Waters gets his man.
Waters was the first of the casebook detectives. The vogue for fictional memoirs of policemen and detectives began with “On Duty With Inspector Field” (Household Words, June 14, 1851), Charles Dickens’ account of one night in the career of Inspector Charles Frederick Field (see: The Casebook). But it was the extremely popular Waters stories which began the subgenre of casebooks. Waters lacks the horror of and loathing for crime of some other casebook detectives, particularly John Bennett’s Tom Fox (see: Tom Fox; or, The Revelations of a Detective). Waters is less of a street cop than Fox, and Waters’ cases take him much farther afield than the city limits of London. Waters covers most of England if the case calls for it. The Waters stories were at least initially aimed toward a more middle-class reading audience than later casebook stories were, so the victims of the crimes in the stories are often from the middle class, rather than the working class, as in later casebook stories. This concern for middle-class crime and middle-class victims anticipates the focus on the middle-class of the sensation novels, and can be said to have been an influence on them. (The Waters stories and the casebook stories were quite popular).
Changes in the literary world, too, laid the groundwork for the rise of these fictional autobiographical texts. The 1830s saw an escalation in serials aimed at working-class consumption and in the publication of novels in weekly instalments. Dickens, who was quick to grasp the potential of new literary modes, first published Pickwick Papers in serial form (1836–7), helping to make it an established publishing format. The same period witnessed an increase in the publication of autobiographical accounts— both true and falsified— of ordinary people who did not lead a lofty life, as well as of professionals. In addition, the reading public in the mid-Victorian decades showed a preference for texts that claimed historical authenticity, such as narratives based on the country’s past. During that period, too, in an effort to avoid the stamp duty levied on newspapers, publications such as the Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette, which appealed to the lower classes, ‘consisted entirely of fiction and fabricated police reports’. Perceptive writers and publishers merged these trends to form the new pseudo-memoir narrative technique. Unfettered by factual constraints, and taking advantage of the growing acceptance of police detection, the writers of such ‘memoirs’ wove dramatic tales of crime and detection, which they presented as a sequence of episodes, a style highly suitable to serial publication. Pretending that the texts were self-revelations by established crime fighters, they insisted on accuracy of detail. For a few decades, starting from the mid-century, this fusion seemed to work, and writers with no experience in detection increasingly used their imagination, and the snippets of facts about detection that they had on hand, to produce the kind of fiction favoured by the reading public.
William Russell was one of the first authors to recognize the attraction of the detective memoir format. He wrote several such pseudomemoirs, but the ‘Recollections of a Police-Officer’, published in Chambers’s Journal between July 1849 (even prior to Dickens’s efforts to promote detectives) and September 1853 under the pseudonym ‘Waters’, enjoyed immediate and sustained popularity, both in instalments and later in volume form.1
Waters is not a particularly clever detective. He is not unintelligent and is certainly competent at what he does, but he lacks the supernatural deductive feats of a Sherlock Holmes (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) or even the insight of an Inspector Bucket (see: Bleak House). This was deliberate on Russell’s part. He wasn’t trying to write the police equivalent of Poe’s Dupin (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries). Russell was trying to create a believable police detective, and he succeeded at that. Waters is an average policeman of slightly above-average intelligence who uses persistence, the latest scientific advances (including the examination of blood and hair under a microscope), and thorough questioning of suspects to get his man. His stories are gritty for their era, though less so than later casebook detectives; there is no late-Victorian delicacy in these stories, which are full of murder, broken families, and ruined finances.
Recommended Edition
Print: William Russell, Recollections of a Policeman. Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., 2009.
[1] Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective, 234.