Something to hide? Try Left Luggage

We know where to look for a body in a trunk

 

take that case to left luggage, lady

In the comments on a recent post,

Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveller by Amelia Tait

we got onto the subject of Left Luggage Offices, particularly in railway stations, and I mentioned that I had a story about a Weeping Bride and her Baggage, so I am going to share.

I was at a major railway station in London, picking up my suitcase, and I noticed a young woman sitting weeping at the side of the pickup point. Because I am a busybody, I scarcely hesitated (even though I was running late) before going over to see if she was OK. We sat together and she told me her story: she was getting married the next day, and had to pick up two suitcases from the Left Luggage, but she didn’t have the proper authorisation and the employee was refusing to give them to her. There was a lot more to this story, but that’s enough really. I had a long chat with her, and we considered some options. Then I went to the operative and said, roughly speaking: ‘look at her! She’s obviously genuine, she’s not making this up. I know you are sticking to the rules, but I’m going to ask you to break them. Come on! Do the right thing, I know you are someone who will do the right thing….’

My theory here is that the young man was similar age to my son, and nice boys like that are respectful (or terrified?) of women who resemble their mothers, and can be persuaded.

And he did – probably a sacking offence, which is why I am being vague about details. (this was ages ago). I have no idea how the rest of her story played out: she told me her name but I have forgotten it – I just hope she is now happier in life than she was that day, when bad things were coming at her.

I tried to make her as cheerful as this GI bride....

The event I was late for, and now even later, was dinner with some crime writer friends. When I slid in, I gave my apologies and told them the story – and you could see them all thinking ‘ooh that would make a good plot, how can I work that up into a scene in a book?’ and a certain amount of trying to claim dibs on  the story from me. But it hasn’t turned up anywhere yet…

So I thought I’d look for some left luggage items that have been checked into books. Some of those below already come from readers in the comments on the original post, so thank you. The rest of you know the deal: add your own in the comments.

Left luggage arrangements very much evolved with railways and travel - in a travel book from 1888, English author, I found this typical piece of advice: ‘the French have recently adopted a plan of a left luggage room, and issue little billets for it, charging one sou (one halfpenny) for each article left…’ and they became very widespread around that time.

In a ridiculous made-up statistic Simenon’s Inspector Maigret claims that ‘six murderers out of ten if they have anything incriminating to get rid of, deposit it in the left luggage office of a railway station’.

That’s in the 1955 Maigret and the Headless Corpse, [no translator credited], so the title gives us all hope as to what might be in a suitcase, but he casually raises then drops that idea, though the dropping off of a case is important for other reasons.

A few years ago I was travelling to Denmark by train and asked online for recos for Danish crime novels. The one I read in transit was called The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis.  In it, a young woman claims a suitcase in left luggage in Copenhagen Station, and finds a boy hiding within. The book also featured a massively violent shootout in the left luggage. I had to use this facility at the beginning and end of my trip, and it was genuinely scarey and creepy to go down there. It was also quite isolated and empty. I still think - worse than the shootout - that the idea of walking off with a suitcase and finding there is a living child in it is a very high-concept heart-stopper. (Nothing happened to me...)

In Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal, the eponymous assassin uses left luggage offices all the time: his intentions may be bad, but his use of them is exemplary: a place to stow a rifle while you go out to lunch. And Forsyth is meticulous at telling you all about these deposits and withdrawals, including at one point ‘a disgusted glance from the clerk in charge’. I don’t quite know why – expecting a tip?

In Graham Greene’s early book, It’s a Battlefield, 1934, there is an instance of what was known as a ‘trunk murder’ back in the day:

The Assistant Commissioner [of police]…wasn't going to carry a revolver within two miles of Scotland Yard. [He was not scared of] the man who had killed Mrs. Janet Crowle and later cut up the body and stowed it in a trunk in the left luggage department at Paddington….

These happenings were a real thing in the era, Charing Cross and Brighton stations in particular, and are always being mentioned in crime stories. But one biographer of Greene goes further. I read in a scholarly journal that ‘In Michael Shelden’s The Man Within: A Life of Graham Greene, he seriously proposes Greene as a suspect in the unsolved case of a pregnant young woman whose torso was found in the left luggage office of Brighton station in June 1934’. Shelden’s evidence apparently (I haven’t read the book) comes from Brighton Rock and ‘other fictions of the 1930s’ so I presume including the abovementioned.

 

note the fur coat lady

There’s a Roald Dahl short story (Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat 1959) and a plotline in the 1960 Cary Grant film The Grass is Greener,  where the key elements are an adulterous wife, a fur coat, and a need to disguise the origins of the gift. Dahl chooses a pawnshop, the film features left luggage. (Actually the Victoria station cloakroom about to be mentioned below)

Both are based on a well-known and untraceable anecdote – what we would now call an internet myth – where a woman wants to smuggle a fur coat, a gift from a lover, into her house. So she puts it in left luggage (or a pawnshop) and pretends she has found the ticket. Her husband goes to reclaim it, but comes back with something different. It sounds rather a niche plot device, but has been used over and over in different forms.

There is an excellent going-over of the story at Snopes, for your pleasure and information

Fur Coat Exchanged | Snopes.com

Once you start thinking about/looking at Agatha Christie’s works you realize that luggage, suitcases &  rucksacks feature to a remarkable level. They are always being left, searched, found in the wrong place. There are bodies in trunks, there are cases in hotel rooms, there are bags left behind here and there. I think the role of luggage in Agatha may have to be a separate project. But a taster: in The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (1923 short story collected in Poirot’s Early Cases), there is a body in a trunk, found at a Glasgow railway station, ‘left to be called for’.

Blogfriend Roger Allen mentioned the classic (non-crime) instance: Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895. (It is described as a cloakroom, but s plainly what we think of as a left luggage facility)

One of the most famous lines in all theatrical history introduces the matter, as Jack describes his origins – he was found as a baby in a handbag:

LADY BRACKNELL.

A hand-bag?

JACK.

[Very seriously.] Yes, Lady Bracknell. I was in a hand-bag—a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it—an ordinary hand-bag in fact.

LADY BRACKNELL.

In what locality did this Mr. James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this ordinary hand-bag?

JACK.

In the cloak-room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own.

LADY BRACKNELL.

The cloak-room at Victoria Station?

JACK.

Yes. The Brighton line.

LADY BRACKNELL.

The line is immaterial. ….You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?

ADDED LATER: I remembered that one of my all-time favourite films, Desperately Seeking Susan, has Madonna leaving her worldly goods in a locker at the Port Authority in New York. The key to the locker becomes an important McGuffin in the plot. 

So those are my examples. Can you think of any more please? Hand them over in the comments, and the blogpolice will be around to check up on them later, see what we find.

[Woman sitting on luggage in Grand Central Terminal] (LOC)… | Flickr 

Jean Weil on the S.S. Argentina, the first "GI Brides" shi… | Flickr

Inside Newcastle Central Station, 1948 | View inside a busy … | Flickr

Six months accumulation dead parcel post, states of Md., Va., W. Va., N.C., & D.C. - NYPL Digital Collections