Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Crippen

Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American doctor in London, 1910. Devoted to his wife, music-hall performer Belle Elmore. He said she left him to go to her lover in America.

If she did, why did she not send a single word to her host of friends? And why could they find no record of her taking a ship?

Then Dr. Crippen announces her death in California. But when police from New Scotland Yard came calling, he changed his story: “So far as I know, she did not die, but is still alive.” And then he fled, with his younger mistress dressed as a boy.

What did Sherlock Holmes and the police find in the tiny coal cellar at Crippen’s North London home? How was Crippen tracked down, in a 3,000-mile sea-chase across the Atlantic to Canada? And why did Chief Inspector Walter Dew call it all “the crime of the century”?