William Roughead : Bad Companions : True Crime : Criminal Trials : 1st Ed 1930

Bad Companions

By William Roughead

With a Foreword by Hugh Walpole

Published by W Green & Son, Edinburgh, 1930. First Edition. Hardback, cloth binding, 301 pages. Illustrated with a frontispiece and a further 8 illustrations.

CONDITION
A very good copy of the first edition. Endpapers good. All contents present and pages good throughout. Overall good.

William Roughead (1870–1952) was a Scottish lawyer and amateur criminologist, as well as an editor and essayist on "matters criminous". He was an important early practitioner of the modern "true crime" literary genre.

Roughead held the title of Writer to Her Majesty's Signet as a Scottish solicitor. As the years progressed, Roughead practised law less and increasingly plied a trade as an unofficial historian of crime. He marks this transition from the year 1889, when at the age of nineteen, he skipped his apprentice work at the law firm of Maclaren and Traquair to attend the trial of Jessie King, the murderous baby-farmer of Stockbridge (an experience he described in his essay "My First Murder: Featuring Jessie King", In Queer Street, 1932). For roughly the next six decades, Roughead attended almost every murder trial of any importance at the High Court of Justiciary. These experiences provided the material he would submit for publication in the Juridical Review, a monthly Scottish legal journal; in later years, he would collect his contributions to the Juridical Review as well as much new material into several anthologies of essays.

His first collection was published in 1913 under the title Twelve Scots Trials, containing a dozen "adventures in criminal biography". The collection included among its twelve cases two notable trials, that of Katharine Nairn and John Watson Laurie, which Roughead was to revisit in more detail later in his career. The title of his first collection apparently was a mild disappointment to Roughead, stating in his "Personal Preface" to his third collection, Glengarry's Way and Other Studies, that "...I have always considered that my venture suffered in its baptism...of those three fateful words two at least were unhappily chosen. 'Scots' tended to arouse hereditary prejudice...'Trials' suggested to the lay mind either the bloomless technicalities of law reports or the raw and ribald obscenities of the baser press." He ended his lament upon his title with characteristic humour, "Had they been a 'baker's dozen' the game would have been up indeed."

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