Burke and Hare: Why I put the spotlight on duo's female victims in my new novel – Mairi Kidd

Venture out in any Old Town close in Edinburgh on any night between Easter and Hallowe’en, and there’s every chance you’ll bump into a costumed performer regaling tourists with stories of the capital’s darkest deeds and most notorious villains. Long before podcasts and streamers like Netflix rebooted interest in true crime, Edinburgh had made an art of trading on the worst episodes in its past.

The appeal of true crime is endlessly debated. Some psychologists theorise that humans like to experience danger at a safe remove, as a means of making us feel more secure – although, in fact, research doesn’t necessarily bear this theory out, suggesting that consumption of violent content with a basis in reality may result in viewers over-estimating the prevalence of crime. Perhaps the genre makes viewers feel secure in their own psychological health and functioning by comparison with the worst perpetrators of crime, or perhaps we just enjoy collecting clues and solving puzzles.

While men commit the vast majority of violent crime, women are the biggest consumers of true crime content and especially of true crime podcasts. Women may be motivated by a perception that, by finding out more about crime, they may be able to keep themselves safer from it. They may also be motivated by empathy – sadly, this is a genre in which they are most likely to ‘see themselves’ in the victims.

Edinburgh provides the backdrop for Mairi Kidd's new novel, The Specimens PIC: Stephen Bridger / Getty Images

When I first decided to write about the 1828 ‘West Port murders’ perpetrated by Burke and Hare – Scotland’s worst ever serial killings and the UK’s worst anatomy murders – I was particularly interested in the women. Eleven of the 15 adult victims were women, but I knew it wouldn’t be possible to piece together their stories in the way that true crime series often seek to do. Burke and Hare ran a lodging house, where they had access to itinerant and otherwise vulnerable victims, and the bodies disappeared into the anatomy theatres, leaving no evidence behind. Once convicted, Burke confessed, but in six cases, he did not know so much as the victim’s name, and he wasn’t clear on the order of the murders either.

In the end I fictionalised the lives of three of the named victims in my novel The Specimens. In doing so, I took care to avoid the suggestion that violent crime is something that happens to ‘other people’. While the killings were intrinsically linked to the time and place – Edinburgh was a centre for the study of anatomy, no legal means existed to procure sufficient subjects for teaching purposes, and Burke and Hare realised the potential for profit – poverty, vulnerability and exploitation are universal. My fictional version of Eizabeth Haldane, one of the later victims, descends from wealth on both sides of her family, allowing me to explore the idea that anyone can fall into poverty or become a victim of crime, often through circumstances beyond their control.

Otherwise, I focused on William Burke’s partner Helen MacDougal, Hare’s wife Margaret, and Susan, the wife of Robert Knox, the anatomist who bought the bodies from the killers. Susan had no involvement in the killings whatsoever, but Helen was tried alongside Burke, and Margaret gave evidence alongside Hare. I was fascinated by the situation of women in the era, and the reasons a wife or lover might have had for standing by her man – or, indeed, helping him – in such a situation.

While the victims’ names are largely forgotten, Burke and Hare have been the subject of many works of history and literature, have loaned their names to a lapdancing establishment (there’s classy), and there’s even a children’s street rhyme to remember them by:

Author Mairi Kidd

Up the close and doon the stair But and ben wi Burke and Hare; Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief Knox is the boy who buys the beef. So what makes Edinburgh so invested in past crimes that even its children’s rhymes lean into the darkness?

Is it our geography? The oldest part of Edinburgh perches perilously on its rocky ridge, where rich and poor lived crammed together within the historic walls. This history has bequeathed us a city that remains on a small scale today. Perhaps there’s an Edinburgh version of that saying about how close one always is to a rat, but with a ghost/infamous crime in place of the rodent? I could certainly speak to that – in my time in the city I have lived in Dalry House, the home of the nobleman John Chiesley, who murdered Lord President Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath in 1689, and today I work in an office in Fountain Close with the unusual feature of a steel door to the kitchen, because the kitchen was originally a vault and the building part of the British Linen Bank. In 1806, a clerk called William Begbie picked up £4,000 from the vault for delivery to a branch in Leith, only to be killed for the money in the close outside. The remarkable levels of preservation that have seen our steel door retained and Dalry House restored may help with a perception that Edinburgh now is much as Edinburgh was then, so we feel close to dramatic events of the past, although I confess that I struggled while working on The Specimens to understand the layout of the Old Town lands and closes in the 1820s (thank goodness for the National Library of Scotland and its amazing digital map collection).

Various layers of the city are of course built on previous layers, making for all sorts of nooks and crannies that moonshine distilleries and other illicit ventures embraced – another feature I exploited in The Specimens – and it is certainly disorienting when a house may have one entrance seven stories above the other. Robert Louis Stevenson called the Old Town an ugly place, and suggested in Picturesque Notes that ‘ugly actions, above all in ugly places, have the true romantic quality’. He was writing at a time when the wealthy had decamped across the Mound and slum conditions prevailed in the Old Town, though he may also have been thinking of the other major beef he had with his home city. ‘The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring’ he wrote. ‘The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.’

So much for our geography and our climate; was our history any darker than anyone else’s? We certainly got behind some very dubious causes, executing more ‘witches’ per capita than any other country in Europe. That was part of our efforts to establish Scotland as ‘ane godlie nation’ and perhaps it’s Calvinism that’s to blame, above all, with its theory of the elect… and the rest. Complementing our obsession with true crime, we are the home of some of the best crime fiction the world has to offer, and perhaps our earliest modern crime novel is James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which plays with the notion of guaranteed Salvation.

Maybe, in the end, it’s just that murder sells, and Scotland’s writers and storytellers have capitalised on the horrors in our history for generations.

The Specimens by Mairi Kidd is published on 26 September by Black & White Publishing, £16.99