Dennis, Alan and Arthur x 3: Literary Legacies of the 'Blazing Car Murder' of 1930

The ‘blazing car murder’ committed by Alfred Arthur Rouse in 1930 was a sensational cause célèbre due to a number of factors, including Rouse's reference, on his arrest, to his ‘harem'; his career as a travelling salesman; and the failure to identify the corpse found burned to death in his car. The case has inspired famous authors, such as the playwright and television writer Dennis Potter, the graphic comic novelist Alan Moore, and the detective fiction writers Dorothy L. Sayers and P.D. James, to write imaginative literary works linked to the case. This article analyses the more significant of those works – those by Potter and Moore – and addresses the link between true crime and literary imagination.