We have always, it seems, been fascinated by our overseas cousins – those who live in other countries appear more exotic, more glamorous; we’re divided by our languages, but also by our cultures. This also applies to foreign crime. Over the centuries, dispatches of various kinds have highlighted the affairs of ‘foreigners’ and the crimes that have been committed. This coverage of foreign affairs – by which I mean, in this article, foreign crime and criminals – inevitably increased in the late 19th century as newspapers proliferated and their pages increased. Newspapers knew that readers loved to read about crime, and did not mind whether that crime occurred locally or further afield.

Some crimes actually started close to home but took on a foreignness, or transatlantic nature, even: take the case of Dr Crippen, who was apprehended when he reached Canada by ship, the police having got there first on a quicker vessel after being tipped off by a telegraph from the ship’s captain.

Another case from the same year, in 1910, saw a ‘famous criminal’, Shuravlev, hitting the British headlines, when he was apprehended in Moscow. The Russian man, who was just 30 years old, was suspected of seven different murders, as well as 15 armed robberies, 12 church thefts and – although this might be a bit of press hyperbole – some 200 other crimes.

The tale of his apprehension was something out of a spy novel. A secret police officer, Muratov, had been walking on a Moscow street when he thought he recognised Shuravlev’s mistress. She was with a man and Muratov correctly guessed that this was probably Shuravlev himself. He grabbed the fugitive by the wrists, intending to arrest him, but Shuravlev freed himself and ran off. As he ran, he drew a revolver from his pocket and fired four times at the detective. Muratov collapsed to the ground and was dead by the time he reached the hospital. Shuravlev, meanwhile, continued firing at anyone near, running from street to street until he reached a cul-de-sac backing onto a railway embankment. He was captured, finally, not by a policeman but by a boy described as a ‘peasant youth’, who rushed for him, grabbing his legs and pulling him to the ground.

The case was immediately attractive to the press, who got wind of it via a Reuters correspondent, communicating by telegram. It involved a murderer who had escaped justice numerous times and who was known for his ability in assuming different disguises; he had managed to evade the authorities and resume his life in Russia – always seen as an exotic, somewhat unknown location; and a member of Russia’s secret police had been killed trying to capture him, only for the man to be caught not by a professional, but by a working-class youth. Many of those eagerly reading the news would have felt they were reading a story straight out of the penny thrillers, one involving a hero from a background similar to theirs.

Other stories, though, were rather sniffy about foreign criminals – or, at least, when they committed crimes in Britain. Again in 1910, there were fears about ‘the modern Continental anarchist’ plaguing British shores, stories of which were used to argue that the British police should be armed, to protect themselves from these cunning political criminals. The British press moaned, ‘We have our own ruffians, but we do not breed that type here, and we do not want them. It may be impossible to keep them out, but it is quite possible to discourage them more effectually than we do.’ It was argued that Britain was an easy target for such offenders, that they liked to come to Britain rather than to other countries in Europe not because the police were less efficient in Britain, but because they had limited powers.

It’s understandable why these clever foreigners were feared. The newspapers were full of tales of derring-do from the wrong side of crime, coverage taking a stern – yet grudgingly admiring – tone when describing the offences these criminals had committed. In 1903, for example, a French-American cook named Georges Junker, aged just 25, pleaded guilty at the Clerkenwell Sessions to a number of thefts carried out at railway stations and London hotels. He was prosecuted by three different railway companies – the London & North Western, the Midland, and the London & South Western. His crimes, as detailed, involved the theft of whole portmanteaus full of clothing as well as the theft of jewellery including a diamond ring from the De Vere Hotel in Kensington. The thefts were audacious as well as frequent, with Junker getting braver as time went on and stealing an ever increasing amount of goods, of higher and higher value. He also had a habit of dressing himself in the expensive stolen clothes of his victims, passing himself off as a society man and eating meals in posh hotels, then walking off without paying his bills. Sergeant Mercer of the Met Police noted that ‘Junker had been engaged in robbing everyone he could come into contact with’. A key aspect of the case that caused the press to purse their lips was the fact that Junker had finally been apprehended at a Christmas party, held in a ‘foreign restaurant’.

Junker got his comeuppance, being jailed for five years, just as a Russian Pole named Johann Coodlezeck [sic] did, when he was also sentenced to five years in prison for stealing £100 worth of diamonds rings and silver from a Kensington major. Johann had a system of getting jobs in upper-class homes and absconding after a few days, armed with the residents’ property. When he was sent to prison, the Common Serjeant – one of the Central Criminal Court judges – ‘commented strongly on the system which allowed foreign criminals to enter this country without let or hindrance’.

Another foreign criminal who was sentenced the same time as Johann was Annie Gleeson, who was originally from Chicago. She had moved to New York, where she became a ‘notorious’ shoplifter; when bailed for one offence, she absconded to London. Here, she had found a ready network of ‘expert Continental and American thieves’ to associate with, and soon started committing thefts on this side of the Atlantic. She was finally arrested regarding the theft of a £1700 pearl necklace, stolen from Christie’s auctioneers. In order to evade capture for this offence, she had replaced the stolen item with a replica she had had made, but she hadn’t quite got all the details of it right and her subterfuge was spotted. Under the pseudonym of Annie Grant, she appeared in court and was sentenced to three years in prison, it being remarked in court that ‘she was a bold and expert thief’.

The coverage of these audacious ‘foreign’ criminals reflects attitudes towards those of foreign birth or ancestry at the time. They were perceived as different, as having attitudes that were simply not British – despite the fact that many homegrown criminals existed. But foreign crime was portrayed as being more glamorous, more exotic, carried out by mysterious men and bold women. These tales of foreign crime seemed more exciting than homegrown offences and, to newspaper readers, represented the factual equivalent of a crime novel or penny dreadful. The more the papers printed, the more readers wanted to read, and so crime coverage contained a steady stream of stories.