In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” (1904), one of the stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes takes on a client he cannot help by the usual means. Lady Eva Blackwell is about to marry, and a man holds letters she wrote years earlier, imprudent but not criminal, which would be enough to break off the engagement. The man is Charles Augustus Milverton, “the king of all the blackmailers”, who asks for seven thousand pounds. Holmes tries to negotiate and fails. So he disguises himself as a plumber, courts Milverton’s housemaid to learn the layout of the house and, with Watson, breaks into it at night to burn the letters. Hidden behind a curtain, they witness the end of the story: a veiled woman, one of Milverton’s earlier victims, whose husband died of grief after he exposed her, enters the study and shoots him dead.
// The theoryCrime as a business
In 1937 Edwin Sutherland published The Professional Thief, an account of the world of offenders who practice crime as a trade: they learn techniques, have a network of contacts and plan their work as a career. In 1973 Peter Letkemann confirmed the picture in Crime as Work: professional offenders speak of their crimes in terms of technique, risk and reward. The sociologist Mike Hepworth applied this view to blackmail in 1975. Blackmail, he argued, is a peculiar trade: it sells nothing that the victim wants, only silence, and its raw material is the gap between what someone has done and what society would forgive. Its profit depends on information, on the value of reputation and on the victim’s calculation that paying costs less than the scandal.
A network, a price list and patience
Milverton’s method has the three features of the professional. He has a network: servants and maids who sell him their employers’ letters, because he pays them well. He has a price list: he knows what each reputation is worth and asks for the maximum the victim can pay without being ruined, because a ruined victim does not pay. And he has patience: he keeps the letters for years until the right moment, usually a wedding. He does not need violence. Holmes says he would rather deal with a murderer, because a murderer acts in the heat of the moment, while Milverton is cold and methodical.
// The subjectThe man who sold silence
What makes Milverton frightening in the story is his calm. He receives Holmes in his house, smiles, explains his terms and makes clear that he has no personal interest in anyone’s suffering: it is a business, and a business has rules. If he gave in to one client, he says, the others would stop paying; he occasionally has to ruin someone to keep his threats credible. That is the logic of a professional who has thought about the long-term value of his reputation as a blackmailer. The calculation is impeccable. What it leaves out is the possibility that one of his victims, having already lost everything, has nothing left to protect and is no longer afraid of him.
Charles Augustus Milverton
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// The crackThe victim who did not do the sums
The professional crime tradition explains Milverton’s method very well, but its model of the victim is incomplete. A blackmailer assumes that every victim reasons like him: that she will pay because paying is cheaper than scandal. The woman who kills him has already paid the highest price—her husband’s death—and her calculation is no longer economic. The theory describes the offender who plans; it says less about how his victims react when they stop being clients. The story also raises an uncomfortable question for criminology: Holmes, the defender of the law, breaks into a house, destroys evidence and lets a murderer escape, because he considers the law powerless against Milverton. Blackmail is one of those crimes that the victims themselves rarely report, precisely because reporting would reveal the secret.
There is another limit. Sutherland described thieves who belonged to a criminal world with its own codes. Milverton belongs to the respectable world: he is a well-dressed gentleman with a house in Hampstead. He is closer to the white-collar offender Sutherland would describe in 1949 than to the thieves of 1937. The professional and the respectable can be the same person.
Silence is the blackmailer’s raw material
Milverton’s business is very much alive. Today it is called sextortion and it works through screenshots and social networks, but it rests on the same three pillars: information obtained from someone close, a reputation the victim wants to protect and the bet that she will pay rather than report. Prevention focuses on breaking that last link: police forces insist that victims should not pay, keep the evidence and report it, because the business only works as long as silence seems cheaper.
Three key ideas
- Crime as a trade (Sutherland, 1937; Letkemann, 1973) studies crime as a profession; Hepworth (1975) applied it to blackmail, a trade that sells silence.
- Milverton has a network of informants among the servants, a price list for each reputation and the patience to wait for the right moment: Holmes calls him “the king of all the blackmailers”.
- The crack: the theory assumes that the victim calculates too; the woman who kills him had nothing left to lose. And Milverton is closer to the respectable white-collar offender than to Sutherland’s thieves.
Sources · further reading
- Sutherland, E. H. (1937). The Professional Thief, by a Professional Thief. University of Chicago Press.
- Letkemann, P. (1973). Crime as Work. Prentice-Hall.
- Hepworth, M. (1975). Blackmail: Publicity and Secrecy in Everyday Life. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Doyle, A. C. (1904). “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”. The Strand Magazine; collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Charles Augustus Milverton?
Charles Augustus Milverton (“El rey de los chantajistas”) is a villain from Sherlock Holmes, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He did not steal or threaten anyone with a gun.
Why does Charles Augustus Milverton (The king of blackmailers) become a villain?
Charles Augustus Milverton and crime as a trade: a dealer in compromising letters who bought secrets from servants and sold them back to their owners. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote him in 1904; thirty years later Edwin Sutherland described the professionals of crime who work exactly like this.
Which criminological theory explains Charles Augustus Milverton?
Charles Augustus Milverton's case is analysed through Crime as a trade. Crime as a trade studies crime as a chosen profession, with a method, a clientele and a network of contacts. Charles Augustus Milverton, the blackmailer of the Sherlock Holmes story that bears his name (1904), is a professional in that sense: he buys compromising letters from servants and maids, calculates how much each victim will pay to keep them quiet and never gets his hands dirty. Holmes, who admires few criminals, calls him “the worst man in London”. The story ends with a lesson the theory does not foresee: one of his victims does not pay, she shoots.
