Glaswegian comic performer Sandy McNab bought 39 Hilldrop Crescent in late 1910 for £500. On taking possession of the house he found the walls that Cora had decorated pink now stripped of their wallpaper and, in some places, even of the plaster and lath. Missing floorboards and pierced ceilings also attested to the exhaustive police searches of the previous summer. While protesting that he had ‘no intention of running the house as a peepshow’, McNab was not averse to penning some gothic press copy reporting his explorations of the deserted building in the last days of 1910:

Beyond his imaginative vision in that evocative coal cellar, McNab found no traces of Crippen, Belle, and Ethel in Hilldrop Crescent in those dark days before Christmas 1910. This vacuum at the centre of the notorious address seems appropriate; the empty house mirrored the impression that the enigmatic, and now forever mute, Crippen had taken his secrets to the grave.

This sense of a story to be fleshed out, and secrets yet to be unearthed, must surely have provided significant impetus for the many literary renditions and re-imaginings of Crippen explored in the previous chapter. If ‘Crippen considered in isolation was something of a cipher’, it fell to the crime novelists, criminologists, and lay commentators to begin the work of inscription, a process which gathered momentum as the ‘classic Crippen’ conception of 1910 was gradually displaced and challenged by new forms of representation and understanding across the fields of literature, psychology, and criminology.