One of the features of our time—as of all times, each of which is new in its generation—is the character of its crimes.
— Catherine Crowe, “A Tale of Modern Germany”
In the preface of her collection Light and Darkness; Or, The Mysteries of Life (1850), Catherine Crowe says she hopes the works contained therein “will not be found unworthy; especially the Tales of Continental Jurisprudence; such as ‘The Tile Burner and [H]is Family,’ ‘The Story of the Priest of St. Quentin,’ ‘The Bride’s Journey,’ &c, &c.” This suggests she saw herself having written a series of pieces unified in the setting of mainland Europe and in the subject of the legal handling of crime.
“A Tale of Modern Germany” (1846), which is retitled “The Morning Visitor” in Light and Darkness, certainly fits this series. It opens with a bit of expository discourse, something like the opening paragraphs about the analytic mental facility in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Crowe, however, discusses how—from an English perspective—”continental criminal records…read like the annals of a previous century. We think we perceive also a state of morals somewhat in arrear of the stage we have reached, and certainly some curious and very defective forms of law.” Hardly immune to Anglocentrism, Crowe writes:
How thoroughly foreign and strange to us was the history of Madame Lafarge! How unlike ours were the modes and habits of life it disclosed, and how vividly one felt that it was the tale of another land! So of the Priest Riembauer, noticed in a late number of the "Edinburgh Review," who murdered the woman he had outraged; the details of whose crime were as foreign to us as the language he spoke.
In other words, Crowe is making Continental crime something tantalizingly exotic while prompting English readers to feel confident in, if not smug about, their nation’s superior legal system—and perhaps its more civilized crimes.
The story itself is about a real-life murderer named Johann Georg Tinius (1764-1846), and an interesting case it is. Tinius was a priest and an avid book buyer. It is speculated that this bibliophilia spurred him to commit a series of robberies. Two of these ended in murder in 1812 and 1813. However, due to legal futzing and finagling, Tinius was not convicted until 1823. Only then did he begin to serve a 12-year sentence. That was his sentence for double murder. Committed with a hammer! Hmm, maybe Crowe is right about the foreign feeling of German jurisprudence in the early nineteenth century.
As far as I can tell, Crowe narrates the case with historical accuracy, and this raises a key question: is this a work of fiction? In that preface to Light and Darkness, Crowe refers to the contents as “tales” and “stories,” but this one might easily be deemed a historical essay, a journalistic report, a biographical sketch, or possibly some early type of creative non-fiction. Ever intrigued by the parallels between Crowe and Poe, I’m tempted to compare it to the latter’s next C. Auguste Dupin detective story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842-1843). Here, Poe fictionalizes the real case of Mary Roger’s murder, exporting it to France, changing names, and having Dupin arrive at a solution to an otherwise unsolved crime. Crowe doesn’t name the culprit until well into “A Tale of Modern Germany,” giving it a structure not unlike a mystery. However, her solution to the murders is the one originally determined by German officials instead of anything more speculative. Its comparison to Poe’s piece of history-made-fiction, then, is too weak to settle the matter.
Upon diving deeper into these “Tales of Continental Jurisprudence,” I might go ahead and remove this from my bibliography of Crowe’s short fiction. Better yet, maybe I’ll move it to its own section for her series about these criminal cases.
BROM BONES BOOKS 