Meadow337
Former Moderator
The 93-year-old crime novelist P.D. James believes she has solved the 1931 murder of Julia Wallace, the inspiration for her 1982 novel The Skull Beneath the Skin. In an article for The Sunday Times [subscription required], she writes that, "a solution to the mystery came into my mind with the strength of an absolute conviction."
In Liverpool in 1931, William Herbert Wallace was convicted of killing his wife Julia, but the conviction was later overturned. Wallace said he left his home after a mysterious message came to his chess club asking him to come to an address that turned out not to exist. When he came back, his wife was dead. The police suspected that Wallace had placed the call himself to provide an alibi. James theorizes that though William Herbert Wallace did, in fact, kill his wife, the call came as a prank call from a local man and one of the other chief suspects, Richard Parry, who had lost his job when Wallace exposed him for cooking books. She believes the fact that the call came on the night Wallace killed his wife was a coincidence. The historian Lucy Worsley told the Sunday Times that she's skeptical: "You would have some difficulty in convincing me that Wallace was guilty. He had the grave misfortune to look like a murderer, but his diary from the very end part of his life revealed that he missed his wife." As The Guardian points out, this isn't the first time mystery novelists have tackled real-world murders: in 2002, Patricia Cornwell claimed that the painter Walter Sickert was Jack-the-Ripper.
In Liverpool in 1931, William Herbert Wallace was convicted of killing his wife Julia, but the conviction was later overturned. Wallace said he left his home after a mysterious message came to his chess club asking him to come to an address that turned out not to exist. When he came back, his wife was dead. The police suspected that Wallace had placed the call himself to provide an alibi. James theorizes that though William Herbert Wallace did, in fact, kill his wife, the call came as a prank call from a local man and one of the other chief suspects, Richard Parry, who had lost his job when Wallace exposed him for cooking books. She believes the fact that the call came on the night Wallace killed his wife was a coincidence. The historian Lucy Worsley told the Sunday Times that she's skeptical: "You would have some difficulty in convincing me that Wallace was guilty. He had the grave misfortune to look like a murderer, but his diary from the very end part of his life revealed that he missed his wife." As The Guardian points out, this isn't the first time mystery novelists have tackled real-world murders: in 2002, Patricia Cornwell claimed that the painter Walter Sickert was Jack-the-Ripper.
I guess its possible but perhaps unlikely - what do you think? Can a novelist solve a crime that police and criminologists were unable to?
