Hacks and robbers

Readers of advanced years like me will almost certainly remember the bow-tied figure of Edgar Lustgarten, star of any number of ‘True Crime’ B movies which were an integral part of a visit to the cinema, or ‘flicks’, when we were young. Some of us also remember his catchphrase when describing the downfall of a murderer, if only because it was a favourite of The Spectator’s one-time political columnist Alan Watkins: ‘It was then that he made his first big mistake.’ As it happens The Spectator features in Lustgarten’s own story, one of many to be told in Duncan Campbell’s very entertaining new book about crime reporting past and present. For it was when walking down the street in December 1978 while reading The Spectator that Lustgarten suffered a heart attack and died.

It was news to me that, prior to his sad demise, Lustgarten, who had many years before chronicled the career of the famous ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer George Joseph Smith, was himself implicated in a bathroom corpse mystery.