Hardback: Law! What law can search into the remote abyss of Nature, what evidence can prove the unaccountable disaffections of wedlock? Can a jury sum up the endless aversions that are rooted in our souls, or can a bench give judgment upon antipathies? - George Farquhar, The Beaux' Stratagem, 1707.
Do earls commit murder?
It is an incendiary question, in a country obsessed with class. Why shouldn't a peer of the realm be a murderer, the same as anybody else?
Why not indeed; yet murdering is something that they seldom do.
Domestic murder? Not at all.
On 7 November 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. A second woman, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named in a coroner's court as the perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since.
Laura Thompson, acclaimed biographer of Agatha Christie, narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the possible truths behind one of postwar Britain's most notorious murders.
The murder of Sandra Rivett symbolized, with an absolute clarity, the collision of worlds. If Lord Lucan were guilty then he had killed with an aristocratic contemptuousness but also with a desperate, secretive brutishness. If he had indeed made a failed attempt at domestic wife-murder, he had done so through lack of money. An earl without means, like the 7th Earl of Lucan, was a peculiarly vulnerable creature, naked beneath his ermine. But in the public consciousness his background became a confirmation of guilt.
For he had lived like a lord, even in 1974, traversing the terrain of Belgravia and Berkeley Square with all the old casual grandeur of his forebears. He had looked like a lord, although the pockets of his Savile Row suits were filled only with IOUs. Perhaps the difference between then and now is that, today, even the luxury of his aristocratic delusions would be impossible. He was the last of his kind. The murder of Sandra Rivett made that clear, too.
A Different Class of Murder (2014) is a portrait of an era, of an extraordinary cast of characters, of a mystery, of a modern myth. Part social history, part detective story, it tells in masterly style one of the great tales of our collective living memory.
About the author: Laura Thompson is author of Somerset Maugham Award-winning The Dogs: A Personal History of Greyhound Racing (1995), Newmarket (2000), Life in a Cold Climate: A Biography of Nancy Mitford (2003) and Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (2007).
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