Murder

Ruth Ellis was, as everyone knows, the last woman in Britain to be hanged – her case a catalyst for the abolition of the death penalty. But is the story we are all so familiar with the whole one? Louisa Treger, a seasoned teller of tales of extraordinary women, brings Ellis to life in a new novel. A Fatal Love presents us with a remarkable woman who committed a remarkable crime. In 1955, when Ellis shot her lover David Blakely outside a pub in Hampstead, domestic violence was seen by the police as a ‘private matter’. ‘Coercive control’ had yet to be coined as a term, and was half a century from being criminalised. In this literary, dialogue-driven thriller, we learn that Ellis’s violent, alcoholic father had also sexually abused her.

‘Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.’ When Emily Eakin first encountered ‘theory’ as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1980s, it marked the start of an obsession, intense as a love affair. She wasn’t the only one. For the Anglophone world, France has long represented a style of thinking that is just that: stylish. It’s not for nothing that an estimated three million American tourists flock to the boulevards of Paris each year. The place is synonymous with glamour in its most alluringly intelligent form.

Do novelists need credentials? Once, almost a century ago, the vogue for hard-boiled fiction meant that in the masculine Hemingway hegemony then holding sway, novelists needed to be graduates of the ‘University of Life’. Writers, it was argued, had to spend their apprenticeship riding the rails, tending bar in tough-guy saloons and doing almost any work that could be described as manual labour.  This changed postwar, with greater affluence and millions more people in higher education, including women. Among them were a growing number taking postgraduate degrees in creative writing – most famously at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but followed quite credibly in this country at the University of East Anglia.

The central figure of The Family Man, the lawyer Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’), spends his life getting implicated in so many heinous, melodramatic crimes that he seems cobbled together by a cabal of tabloid and commercial publishers, crime podcasters and providers of big budget cinematic sleaze. Memorably referred to by psychopathologists and public prosecutors as a ‘family annihilator’ (imagine a little bit of Medea, a little bit of the Menendez brothers and a whole lot of Oedipus Rex), he was arrested in 2021 for slaughtering his wife Maggie and their youngest son Paul with the same sort of high-tech military weaponry that he enjoyed wielding around his family compound to hunt hogs, and which visitors often found lying randomly about his home and gardens.

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favourite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 13 March 1996, a man walked into the gymnasium at Dunblane Primary School, near Stirling, Scotland. He was armed with two 9mm Browning self-loading pistols, two .357 Smith & Wesson revolvers and 743 rounds of ammunition. Within three or four minutes, he’d fired 105 rounds, resulting in the deaths of a teacher, Gwen Mayor, and 16 children. A further three teaching staff and 14 children were injured. He then took his own life. It could have been a great deal worse.  There was a suspicion that he intended to kill most of the school’s 600 pupils but that he’d arrived a few minutes late for assembly, by which time most of the children had dispersed to their classrooms.

Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star and living with her widowed mother in Camden Square; and impoverished Mary Pearcey, who lodges in a Hampstead boarding house and is accused of the grotesque murder of a woman and her baby. It was a celebrated case in its day, coming soon after the Ripper murders, and it is now revived in Moggach’s vivid, immersive imagination. Part of the novel’s attraction lies in its setting in and around Camden Town.

Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months. Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, it is suffused with the glamour and intrigue of these filmmakers’ worlds. It offers a fictional retelling of the events that led up to Pasolini’s murder – a crime that remains unsolved – on 2 November.

A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal grind, but English lessons brought moments of magic. He was especially intrigued by poems – ballads, mostly – signed simply ‘Anon’. The name of the poet was lost – and perhaps there hadn’t been just one but a host of craftsmen in the making of each of these wonders. They were the creation of a tribe, the inheritance of a community, songs ‘seraphically free/ Of taint of personality’. Today, as publishers bust themselves to promote the cult of individual authors, it’s a thrilling, liberating notion.