A couple of years ago I read Erik Larson's Thunderstruck,
about the hunt for and capture of H. H. Crippen. That book focused on the
development of wireless communication and how it was used for the first time in
the hunt for a suspected murderer. Larson is well known for his nonfiction
books that read like fiction; that is, he has a strong narrative style that
builds suspense and drama. At the same time, Larsen is writing about history,
and so can be considered infotainment.
By contrast, Hallie Rubenhold is writing about history for the sake of history
in her books, and so it does not have the dramatic feel of Larson's writing,
but that does not mean that Rubenhold isn't a talented writer, just that her
emphasis in writing is different.
Rubenhold's purpose of writing about the Crippen case is to
take a long look at the women in the case rather than focusing on Crippen. She
is following a noticeable shift in the genre of true crime, which is a
deliberate effort to take the narrative spotlight off the perpetrator and place
it instead on the people whose lives were changed or ended by the crime.
She does this by an extensive study into the lives of Belle Elmore (Cora
Crippen) and Ethel Le Neve and, as much as possible, Charlotte Bell, Crippen's
first wife. Of course, their stories are told within the framework of
Crippen's, but Story of a Murder spends more time on the
specific records of Elmore and Le Neve and the nature of women's lives in the
Edwardian Era in which they lived than other treatments of the subject.
Rubenhold attempts to portray both Elmore and Le Neve
without the distortion provided by the sensationalism of the Edwardian press.
This lack of moral judgment is missing from many retellings of the Crippen
case, and persisted even up until the 2008 PBS documentary Who Was
Hawley Crippen?. Elmore has been represented by the press as an immoral
woman who drove Crippen to the crime, and the defense did the same. The
effort to place Belle’s character on trial may sound like something left behind
in the Victorian or Edwardian Eras, but the impulse to put the victim on trial
instead of focusing on the crime is something we have not outgrown. We see
movement in current court transcripts and laws, but we see from the ability of
true crime writers to capitalize on the notoriety of the criminals, rather than
the impact on the victims, that society's love affair with murderers is long
from over.
I was hesitant to start Story of a Murder feeling that I was
tired of the case and wouldn't learn anything new. I felt that the presentation
of the case was repetitive, but it was the deeper introduction to Elmore and Le
Neve that I enjoyed. Both Rubenhold and Larson had to include some of the
salacious statements in the historical record, but neither of them used those
statements as a way to characterize the women. Rubenhold's book provides a
complete story, following Le Neve's life until her death, but doing so by
focusing on those aspects of her life that relate to the crime.
I had heard of Rubenhold's book The Five, about the victims of Jack
the Ripper, and I was intrigued. But even more so than the Crippen case, the
Ripper crimes have had so much written on them that I am not sure I could
handle the repetition of what I already know to engage with the material that
would be new. On the other hand, Rubenhold's writing is so well done that it
might be worth a try.
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