Well, we know from Bucket's testimony that it was a pocket pistol. And we know from narrative testimony that it made a very big bang indeed. The procedural details, though, are vague. For instance, no notion of where the murderess (a domestic servant of French origins) came by the pistol. Or how she learned to use it. Odd really, rather unsatisfying, given that this, unless I am very much mistaken, and I often am, was the first firearm murder in English literary history.

   Guns rarely feature in the real world murder stories of the early Victorian period, or indeed the 19th Century as a whole. Firearms are accorded scant (if any at all) mention in De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, which takes as its departure point the 1811 Ratcliff Highway murders, where the weapons of choice were close-quartered instruments both blunt and sharp.

   Jump forward a few decades and you have a similarly fruitless search for gun crime in the Sherlock Holmes stories. True, Holmes sometimes toys with guns and even, in a peerless instance of low comedy, contrives to shoot and kill a dog. Watson is persuaded to bring along his service revolver on some outings, self-defence for the use of, but I can’t recall any instances of him having to discharge it.

   Bleak House is a real outlier.

   The use of handguns in English domestic murders was rare in the Dickens era largely because pistols were still, by and large, in England, heavy and hard-to-manage flintlock affairs.

   Interestingly though, Dickens was ahead of the game. Revolvers had begun to emerge in the US in the 1830s; and the author’s fascination with handguns can be traced back to 1842 and his first tour of America (where, then as now, guns were in greater pro-rata circulation than in England). And in the early 1850s, when he was writing Bleak House, he put on his journalist’s hat to pay a visit to Colt’s new London factory where he almost certainly handled (and probably fired) the company’s newest models, including the Pocket model first brought to market in 1849.

   So he may have fantasised about Tulkinghorn being dispatched by a Colt. Or maybe he merely calculated that his future readers would do so.

   But if we’re being pedantic and we’re reckoning that the Tulkinghorn murder was committed in 1853 at the latest, then the handgun used would almost certainly have been a flintlock, probably a duelling pistol or an “overcoat” pistol like the Barton (expensive, produced in small quantities) rather than the Light Dragoon Service Pistol, horribly unwieldy but put into widespread domestic circulation by the survivors of the Battle of Waterloo.

   Anyway. A fictional first. Maybe.

   A single shot, a loud report, a house shaken.

   Then a stain upon a floor.​