No matter how exquisitely English —gobbets of blood amid the fireplace ornaments — murder annihilates meaning. Even when the motive is clear and strong, even when the progression to the fatal blow can be analysed step by step, all that is left amid the eviscerated lives of loved ones is an emptiness around the violence itself. In fiction, this void is filled: Agatha Christie understood very well about hatred, and her stories seethe with it. In 1935, as millions of her readers were devouring Murder on the Orient Express — a novel constructed around a biblical act of molten vengeance — the nation was suddenly mesmerised by a real-life shocker: a weird and savage killing in the genteel south-coast resort of Bournemouth.
The incongruous setting was a house called Villa Madeira, the apotheosis of interwar respectability; the victim, Francis Rattenbury, was an architect in his late sixties. He was in the sitting room after everyone else had apparently retired to bed; his skull was bashed in with a mallet.
Sean O’Connor’s meticulously researched account of the murder and trial, the lurid scandal and repercussive aftermath is superbly evocative and gripping.
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