An Evening With The Norris'sCrime, and the talent leading to its solution by the authorities, is, by the very nature of its commission, a dubious and unpredictable activity at the best of times. In the world in which we live today, police forces around the globe have managed to raise the detection rate of most crimes, including murder, to a level far more acceptable to society than was the case a hundred years and more ago. At the time of the Jack the Ripper killings and of the Underground Railway murders, however, the science of criminal detection relied almost as much on luck and the caprices of chance, as on the painstaking detective work carried out by the committed, though technologically bereft, members of the police force.
Without doubt, the longer a case remained unsolved, the les
