“ I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?” —Agatha Christie

I have for some months now subscribed to electronic versions of The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books. The big controversy in the letters columns recently has been a heated discussion over who has done the most accurate translations of Proust. These publications rarely, if ever, review mysteries so I was surprised when both of them gave lots of space and serious attention to Laura Thompson’s new book about the Lord Lucan case, A Different Class of Murder.

Lord Lucan, peer of the realm, was a handsome fellow. Vittorio de Sica thought of using him in a movie and Cubby Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, thought him the very image of the suave spy.

In November, 1974, his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, was brutally murdered in the basement of the Lucan home and his wife, Veronica, was also bashed multiple times over the head. Lucan, who had been separated from his family, was at the house that night, He told friends that he had gone past the house and seen someone struggling with his wife. Lady Lucan contended that he was her assailant. She said that after he hit her over the head he tried to force his fingers down her throat in order to kill her. She grabbed him by the family jewels. He released her and then tended to her wounds. They spent some time together but when he left the room she ran to the local pub and the police were called. He went to the home of a friend and called his mother and asked her to look after the children. The police were at his mother’s house. His mother suggested he talk to the police but he said he would contact them the following morning. He was never seen again. Perhaps I should amend that. He has been seen many times since then in the same way that Elvis continues to be spotted.

Lucan has his detractors and supporters. The detractors say that Lucan, who had become a spectacularly unsuccessful gambler killed his wife because he failed to get custody of his children (Not only was he paying to support her, he had to pay her court costs as well as his own when he lost the case). His wife, a bright woman whom he had worked to drive mad, was disliked by his friends. His friends plotted his escape from England and they continue to support him. There have been sightings of him all over the world. (Most sightings have occurred in South Africa and Botswana.)

His supporters say that the police never really entertained the idea that anyone other than Lucan had committed the murder. His wife was an unreliable witness with an extensive psychiatric history (Barristers were not allowed to bring this up during the inquest). Nothing his wife said against him was the subject of any serious scrutiny.

He left England because he believed he could not get a fair trial and wrote a letter to his friend, William Shand Kydd, asking that he look after the children.

Laura Thompson’s book attempts to make sense of all this material (Her prose makes for somewhat heavy sledding). She feels that Lucan got a raw deal because he was a lord and seemed to live a lush life during the 1970s, a time when the social and economic tumult would lead to the rise of Margaret Thatcher. She presents different versions of events. Both reviews of the book that I read talked about her speculations being occasionally “vulgar.” I looked in vain for the vulgarity. I was sure that this would be what Americans would call “the juicy parts.”

Thompson favors the idea that Lucan paid someone to kill his wife and then thought better of it and went to the house to intervene but was too late. Distraught over the mess he had made, he committed suicide by throwing himself off cliffs, off the side of the boat… etc.

Lord Lucan’s son, George, thinks that his father hired someone to stage a burglary so that he could collect insurance money. The piping used on Sandra Rivett and Lady Lucan was intended for breaking a window. The faux burglar was totally undone when he saw Sandra Rivett, killed her and attacked Lady Lucan.

I don’t know if Thompson’s book will spur the interest that the merits of Proust translations have, but James Fox, whose article about the case was written around the time of the murder, has already written in to disparage what he sees as Thompson’s exoneration of Lord Lucan and to defend Lady Lucan.

I await the next “Letters” columns with ‘bated breath and muffled oar.

© 2015 Stephanie Patterson

My First True Crime

In the summer of 1967 I was spending time at home. Though I was 14 and about to turn 15, at the beginning of the summer I was still waiting to see if my parents were going to insist I have a babysitter. My last babysitter had not been reengaged.

Mrs. Marsh was a single mom, one of whose daughters was in my class at school. She was nice enough but life at her home was boring. Her taste in music ran to the Ray Conniff singers and she served one unvarying lunch: Warmish iced tea in waxy glasses and Kraft American Singles (you couldn’t call it cheese) on toasted bread. She was rarely my babysitter in the afternoons. She went off to the officer’s club at the local military base and her daughter, my classmate, was in charge of me.

One day she came home aglow (and perhaps a-slosh) with the news that she had seen my father at the officer’s club. She leered at me and it was only some years later that I realized that if he was talking to officers at all, they were probably female. Alas, for Mrs. Marsh, my dad also saw her, the caretaker of his delicate daughter, at a bar in the middle of the day. As I wasn’t knocking back martinis with her, she couldn’t be watching me. She was out of a job.

I begged to be on my own. If I promised not to answer the door or go off our property, what could possibly happen? Would reading too many books put me in danger? So my parents, with some reluctance, let me stay home by myself. My mother left sandwiches for lunch and I was allowed soda pop. Normally, I would have listened to the Beatles, and Broadway show recordings (I can still can do a fair number of Rex Harrison’s ‘songs’ from My Fair Lady) but in the early part of the summer I had a larger task.

My parents and I were a Nielsen family. We got a weekly log in which we were to record what we watched on T.V. The big event in the early summer of 1967 was the Arab-Israeli War (also known as the Six Day War). All the networks were covering the debate at the United Nations. I recorded that I watched every minute of that debate.

I wanted the folks at Nielsen to know that I was a teenager deeply interested in world affairs. (The fact that information about names and ages wasn’t requested didn’t faze me.) And I did learn something. I learned that when U.N. delegates really despised each other they hid it under diplomatic language. No delegate called another a smarmy little worm. The language went like this: “If I might remind my distinguished, learned, honorable colleague…” That’s diplomatic lingo for smarmy little worm.

What was I really glued to? My hardcover copy of Dorothy Kilgallen’s Murder One.

Yes, while foreign intrigue featured on T.V., my book spoke of malice domestic. This was ,for my naive 15 year old self, hot stuff. I’m sure no 15 year old of today would turn a hair.

The trials Kilgallen covers span the 1930s to the 1960s and they all involve sex. Kilgallen has a way with a phrase. Describing Bernard Finch who is on trial for the murder of his wife: “Dr Finch at 40 had a lucrative surgical practice, was a ranking tennis amateur, and had a winning way with the ladies. He was, in short, notably successful both as a surgeon and an operator.”

In the case of “Greta Peltz,” who spices her love letters with bits of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, we are told that her defense attorney whispers this Lawrence into the record. Ms. Peltz admits to killing her lover because he raped her. She is acquitted it seems, not so much because of the rape, but because her lover asked her to perform repulsive sex acts. Ah, guilt in a more innocent time. There are also accounts of one case that very much resembles An American Tragedy and the first trial of Sam Shepard. I loved this book.

When my parents came home, I made sure to regale them with stories from the U.N. My mother knew what I was reading, but hadn’t read the book herself. Then one evening my father, no reader he, came home, picked up the book, and started leafing through it.

“You’re reading this?”

“Yes.”

“Well as long as it doesn’t make you uncomfortable and you’re not bored.”

“No,” I assured him. “Never bored.”

© 2014 Stephanie Patterson