myself, think so.

If these women, some of them, are not greater monsters than their
male analogues, monsters they still remain. If they are not,
others of them, greater rogues and cheats than males of like
criminal persuasion, cheats and rogues they are beyond cavil.
The truth of the matter is that I loathe the use of superlatives
in serious works on crime. I will read, I promise you, anything
decently written in a fictional way about `master' crooks,
`master' killers, kings, queens, princes, and a whole peerage of
crime, knowing very well that never yet has a `master' criminal
had any cleverness but what a novelist gave him. But in works on
crime that pretend to seriousness I would eschew, pace Mr Leonard
R. Gribble, all `queens' and other honorifics in application to
the lost men and women with whom such works must treat. There is
no romance in crime. Romance is life gilded, life idealized.
Crime is never anything but a sordid business, demonstrably poor
in reward to its practitioners.

But, sordid or not, crime has its human interest. Its
practitioners are still part of life, human beings, different
from law-abiding humanity by God-alone-knows-what freak of
heredity or kink in brain convolution. I will not ask the
reader, as an excuse for my book, to view the criminal with the
thought attributed to John Knox:

``There, but for the Grace of God, goes ----'' Because the
phrase might as well be used in contemplation of John D.
Rockefeller or Augustus John or Charlie Chaplin or a man with a
wooden leg. I do not ask that you should pity these women with