Something for the “Silly Season”: Policing and the Press in Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery

Abstract

This article examines Israel Zangwill’s little-known locked-room mystery, The Big Bow Mystery (1891), which was serialized in T. P. O’Connor’s East End Radical newspaper, the Star . I focus on the novel’s portrayal of the detective as a murderer and his interaction with the London press. I illuminate the novel’s critique of Scotland Yard and the growing late Victorian trend for sensationalist crime reportage in the wake of the Whitechapel murders of 1888.