Trial of Christiana Edmunds by Kate Clarke

Kate Clarke is a doyenne of British women true crime writers. It's often forgotten how many women have been first-rate writers on the subject of true crime - Fryn Tennyson Jesse, for instance, was a leading light in the field for decades - and Kate has been writing high-calibre books for at least as long as her distinguished predecessor. With Bernard Taylor, she co-wrote Murder at the Priory, which was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.

Her latest publication is an entry in the happily revived series of Notable British Trials - it is number 92 in the series, and it's an account of the trial of Christiana Edmunds. This case is truly fascinating and among those crime novelists who have referenced it are Anthony Berkeley and John Dickson Carr. It is a murder mystery that involves poisoned chocolates - definitely one of my favourite detective fiction tropes!

Christiana Edmunds was a deeply disturbed woman who became obsessed with a doctor in Brighton called Charles Beard. She knew Dr Beard and his wife Mary socially, and it may be that Beard, deliberately or unwittingly, encouraged her friendship with him. If so, he paid a very heavy price, as her obsession took a very dark turn indeed, leading her to carry out a series of poisonings in the town from 1870 onwards. 

Her first victim was Mary Beard, and although Mary survived, Christiana embarked on a campaign of lacing chocolate creams with strychnine. One child died as a result and others were made seriously ill. Eventually she was found guilty of murder, although her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she spent the rest of her life in Broadmoor, dying there in 1907. Beard was among her victims: his own mental health was destroyed by his involvement in the case.

Kate Clarke provides a crisply written and detailed introduction, and in addition to the fascinating trial transcript (I noted that Christiana's defence counsel referred to her 'idiotic vanity' among other things...) there are useful appendices and a good index. For anyone interested in this remarkable case, this book is required reading.  

  

Forgotten Book - Better Dead

I've been meaning to take a look at the work of John and Emery Bonett (the writing name of a husband and wife team, John Coulson and Felicity Carter) for some time, but I've only just got around to their 1964 novel Better Dead. The story is set in the Costa Brava, an area the couple knew very well. My recent trip to Spain seemed like the right moment to give a try to this novel (known in the US as Better Off Dead). Overall, it's an odd one, a mixture of genuinely pleasing elements and deeply disappointing flaws.

Let's start with the positives. The fictional town of Rocadamor is nicely evoked (it's clear that the authors, who settled in Spain in later life, were disenchanted with life in England), the police detective - who is called Borges - is appealing, although off-stage for most of the novel, and the writing is agreeable, with prose a cut above the average. The way in which the story ends is also quite well done.

However, I had major reservations about the plot and structure, reservations closely connected with some aspects of the characterisation. The story begins with two Englishmen, a head teacher who is about to open a school for local children and the architect he has hired, discovering a body. The corpse belongs to a bar manager called Ferdy whom they both had reason to detest. I'm afraid that I found the way they reacted to this discovery to be utterly implausible.

We then have a very, very long flashback, in which we're introduced to a variety of local characters, mostly English, all of whom seem to have possible motives to kill Ferdy. They are an interesting bunch, but unfortunately, I found some of those motives unconvincing. In a way the trouble stems from the fact that the characters are quite well-drawn. But if one creates intelligent people who behave in a consistently stupid way, that behaviour needs to be convincing. Of course intelligent people behave foolishly very often in the real world, but in fiction there does need to be a degree of believability - and I felt the Bonetts failed to supply this. I couldn't really get my head around why the culprit behaved as they did. As a result, in my opinion the plot doesn't really work. A shame, because this is a book that I wanted to like more than I did. Frustrating.