My first novel, The Death Mask Murders, was inspired by my work as a volunteer guide at the Old Melbourne Gaol. In the cells are displayed death masks of executed felons. This gave me the impetus for a storyline: What if the psychopath in The Death Mask Murders had developed a fixation with death masks and created them as ‘trophies’ of his victims?
Back in the real world of Australia in the 1800s, these death masks were created to prove that criminality could be predicted by applying the pseudo-science of Phrenology. This theory asserted that a person’s character could be determined by the shape, or contours, of their skull. Although this theory has now passed its ‘use-by date’, I was fascinated to learn that some expressions associated with Phrenology are still used today. For example, describing people as ‘well-rounded’, their interests as ‘high-brow’ or low-brow’, or even suggesting that ‘You should get your head read,’ are derived from Phrenology.
Similarly, there were others in the past who ascribed criminal tendencies to certain physical characteristics. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist from the late nineteenth century, asserted that most murderers who committed crimes of passion had bright or ‘hard’ blue eyes. To support his case, examples of serial killers were given: Dr Crippen, who buried his wife under the basement floor; Frederick Deeming, who had a nasty habit of murdering his wives and children and burying them under the hearth of the fireplace; and George Joseph Smith (the ‘Brides-in-the-Bath’ murderer), who dispatched his three wives by drowning them in the bathtub. All had bright, blue eyes of hypnotic intensity. In Pennsylvania, the killers of Joseph Raber, who murdered him for his life insurance, were known as ‘The Blue-Eyed Six’, as shown on his tombstone. It is said that the unusual nature of that crime and the striking nickname given to the killers inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write the Sherlock Holmes story, The Red-Headed League.
If you think lumps and bumps and blue eyes are indicative of criminal tendencies, Professor Richard Berry, from the University of Melbourne in 1920, was quoted as saying that criminals were born with heads one or more sizes smaller than normal.
Criminologists have argued over the years as to whether nature (genetics) or nurture (environment, relationships, experiences) determines personality. Set in Melbourne in the dying days of the Great War, The Death Mask Murders grapples with the age-old question: Can a person be born evil?
The Death Mask Murders is the first book in The Reggie da Costa Mysteries.
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