Did She Kill Him? by Kate Colquhuon reviewed by Julia Jones

I love the subtitle to this book: Did She Kill Him? A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery & Arsenic. Did She Kill Him? is an account of the 1889 trial of Florence Maybrick who was accused of poisoning her older husband, Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick, with arsenic. Colquhuon's diligent research and effective presentation makes arsenic a major player in this story -- almost a household member or the third person in an unhappy marriage.

"Toxic to most plants and to all animals with a central nervous system arsenic was practically impossible to evade by the mid-nineteenth century, present in clothes and candles, wallpapers and lampshades, in confectionery and millinery, fake flowers, concert tickets, toys beer, cot and boot linings, perambulators and pants as well as being legitimately available for killing rats, moths and flies [...] so pervasive was it that in 1860 the Lancet invited its readers to imagine a man living in  cloud of arsenical dust, sitting in his library on a summer day, his walls coated with arsenic, a suspicious green dust on his books and arsenical particles floating in the air, filling his air passages, inflaming his eyes, disturbing his digestion and preparing him for dismal and racking pains."*

Arsenic was a source of sensational stories which were all too often true. True crime aficionados and anyone intrigued by forensics will enjoy Colquhuon's explanations of the different scientific tests being developed for arsenical poisoning and the revelations of inadequacy in the doctors and the expert witnesses testifying at Florence Maybrick's trial.  Florence's husband James was a self-medicator and an arsenic addict. When the family GP responded to Florence Maybrick's anxiety and queried the number of pills and potions littering her husband's dressing room, James Maybrick simply changed doctors.

Arsenic made him dyspeptic, irritable and hard to live with. Worse than that; one reason for Maybrick's arsenic habit (and probably for his sensitivity on the subject) was that it was a drug believed to enhance potency. Maybrick was never a faithful husband. There were actual third -- and fourth -- persons in this marriage. James 'kept' a mistress permanently: Florence 'played away' once. It's a shocking indictment of late Victorian double standards that, in Judge Stephens's summing up at the end of the complex murder trial, Florence's few nights with a young lover in a London hotel became almost the justification for her conviction. Nothing was made of James's long-term affair and even Florence herself appears to have colluded with her lawyers in suppressing the identity of the Other Woman.

Colquhuon writes well about the mutual disenchantments and "curdling discontent" within this marriage. Part one of Did She Kill Him? is written with the vividness of a bio-pic. She does not hesitate to describe the smell of the sea or the drumming of the rain, the smouldering of ash in the household grate or Florence's movements as she examines her own complexion in the mirror. "Although I have stuck rigorously to contemporary sources, the reconstruction of history inevitably remains to some extent a work of imagination." As a reader I hesitated a moment then relaxed and enjoyed the sensuousness of this descriptive writing.

It vanishes, rightly, from the analysis of the trial. Here Colquhuon is clear and painstaking. The doctors are on trial as much as the accused. The court of public opinion is fully involved and jurors are confused and fallible.  The scene is set for a miscarriage of justice which Colquhuon suggests has much wider ramifications than the fate of a single individual. She works hard to situate Florence Maybrick in her social and cultural context -- an American girl caught in the stifling atmosphere of the affluent provincial middle class, an exemplar of changing attitudes towards female sexuality, a young wife in a household where she has no meaningful occupation. James and Florence, their children and domestic staff, lived at "one of Liverpool's best suburban addresses". It's an added pleasure that the name of their substantial, squarely built semi was Battlecrease House.


*italics are used in this book to refer the reader to sources in the endnotes. My copy was a printed proof. I imagine they could be especially effective in indicating links in the electronic version. I notice an Amazon reviewer grumbling about the quantity of endmatter. Personally I felt that this was a full account and I would expect it to be well-referenced -- which it is.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Did-She-Kill-Him-Victorian-ebook/dp/B00DVL655Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1395079884&sr=8-1-fkmr0

To Die a Dry Death by Greta van der Rol

Review by Bill Kirton

Yet again, I find myself starting a review with a disclaimer. This book was written by someone who is now a friend, but I read and made notes on it long before I got to know her. I’ve explained before that friendship is never an issue in my appreciation (or otherwise) of books and, in this case, it’s completely irrelevant. Which is very convenient because I’m about to enthuse about it.

It’s a fictionalisation of an actual event – a mutiny far more dramatic than that of the Bounty. An online search will give you plenty of articles on the story of the Dutch East India Company’s ship the Batavia, which, on her maiden voyage in 1629 ran aground on a reef in the uncharted ocean off Western Australia. The survivors, including women and children, found themselves on islands where food and water were scarce. The ship’s captain, the company’s representative and some of the crew set sail in a longboat for the port which gave the ship its name (today known as Jakarta). Their intention was to alert the company to the event and return to rescue those left behind and retrieve the valuable cargo. What happened on the islands is the stuff of nightmares.

And it’s these nightmares – with the imaginative reconstruction of the whole episode, its characters, their motives and the outcomes – which are chronicled in the pages of this tremendous page-turner of a book. So thorough is the author’s research and so sensitive and skilful her handling of it all that it really does read as a chronicle rather than as fiction. The characters are given individual life, their conversations carry the immediacy of the events through which they’re living, and the extremes they endure and inflict on one another are conveyed in balanced, modulated prose which remains clear and restrained even when describing unspeakable cruelties and barbarism.

As well as fighting thirst, hunger and the elements, those left on the islands are subjected to internal strife between soldiers and sailors, men and women, Dutch, French and Germans, all pawns in a power struggle which is a microcosm of the 17^th century’s mores. If the sea has been cruel, those who lust for power and control surpass it many times over. The ingredients for an action-packed adventure are already there but it’s the confidence with which they’re handled, interpreted and realised that lets us share the intensity of all its horrors. We’re dealing with a specific culture and its sensibilities but the rawness of its humanity transcends them to give the whole an authenticity and a visceral realism which we live with the victims. For the reader, this is time travel.

The evocation of the main characters gives the story its urgency, its insistence; the shipwreck itself is high drama and conveyed with extraordinarily detailed realism. The debate about whether priority should be given to salvaging the company’s property or the people on board is not an abstraction but an aspect of the writer’s characterisation of those at the centre of the narrative. And, at the same time, the author deftly uses narrative ‘tricks’, such as when she conveys the horrific crimes being perpetrated in a hospital tent not by direct observation but through half-perceived shadows and stifled noises.

The journey on the long boat is intercut with the progressive barbarities being enacted among the survivors to sustain the novel’s pace and the different factions within those two separate strands add to the narrative’s density. In fact, it’s legitimate to talk not of the book’s narrative but of its narratives.

The story ends with a very clever twist. Before that, though, we experience the basest expressions of the worst in human nature. There is honour, courage, love, compassion but there’s also an increasingly intense experience of horror. This is Lord of the Flies multiplied several times and in its adult manifestation. It betrays the uneasy coexistence of civilisation and savagery, the corrosive contagion of violence. In fact, horror becomes a pastime.

This, of course, is a novel, a fictional account of a historical incident and, in a note at the end, the author suggests further reading. But it’s hard to believe any book could come closer to conveying the essence of this astonishing series of events. If ever there was a five star read, this is it.