Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters - The Case in Popular Culture

The Case in Popular Culture

The Thompson and Bywaters case has provided the basis for several fictional and non-fictional works and depictions.

The couple are the subject of waxworks at Madame Tussauds.

Alfred Hitchcock expressed the wish to make a documentary film on the case, several times commenting that the Thompson and Bywaters case was the one he would most like to film. At the start of the 1920s, Hitchcock had been taught to dance by Edith Thompson's father at the Golden Lane Institute at a time when he worked for the Cable Car Company.' His sister and Avis Graydon became close friends later, as they served in the same RC church in Leytonstone. Hitchcock exchanged Christmas cards with Avis Graydon but they never discussed the case. He instructed his authorised biographer, John Russell Taylor, not to touch on the case of Edith Thompson in case it caused her sister distress, even after all those years. Some aspects of the case have similarities to the plot of Hitchcock's 1950 film Stage Fright.

In 1934, F. Tennyson Jesse published A Pin to See the Peepshow, "a fictional account of the Thompson-Bywaters case despite the usual disclaimer at the front that all the characters are imaginary. The title refers to the children's entertainment at which (she) first met her lover-to-be." This was dramatised on TV in 1973 with Francesca Annis playing Edith, John Duttine as Bywaters, and Bernard Hepton as Thompson.

A play written in the 1930s by Frank Vosper, People Like Us, was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain and remained unperformed until 1948 when it premiered at the Wyndhams Theatre, London, in the West End.

There are a number of references to Edith Thompson in the Agatha Christie novel Crooked House (1949).

In the 1981 British television series The Lady Killers an episode called Darlingest Boy dealt with the Thompson and Bywaters murder case. In it Edith Thompson was played by Gayle Hunnicutt while Frederick Bywaters was played by Christopher Villiers.

In non-fiction, Lewis Broad wrote The Innocence of Edith Thompson: A Study in Old Bailey Justice in 1952.

René Weis published a biography of Thompson, titled Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, in 1988.

Jill Dawson published a fictional version of the case entitled Fred and Edie in 2000.

Weis' biography, with a new preface about the case and his letter of appeal to the Home Secretary, appeared in 2001, as did the film Another Life, which told their story, and in which Natasha Little played Edith Thompson, Nick Moran played Percy Thompson, and Ioan Gruffudd played Freddy Bywaters.

In 2006, the writer Molly Cutpurse published A Life Lived (ISBN 1-4241-1152-8), a novel on how Edith's life might have developed had she been allowed to live.

P. D. James (The Murder Room, 2004), Dorothy Sayers, and Anthony Berkeley Cox (writing as Francis Iles) have written fiction based on their story.