More than a century on, the case of the Edwardian wife killer Hawley Harvey Crippen continues to fascinate. It has become, as Hallie Rubenhold puts it in her new study of the murder, more a ‘cultural legend’ than a mere criminal case. The mild-mannered ‘doctor’ (actually a quack and swindler) with his myopic gaze and drooping moustache had, like many psychopaths, a potent personal charm. The sense of his charm seems to have lingered long after his death, strengthening the legend of a meek little husband driven to murder by a domineering, faithless and altogether impossible wife. 

Rubenhold’s aim is to blow that legend out of the water and expose Crippen as the scheming, lying, self-serving narcissist that he was – and along the way put an end to the equally potent myth that his mistress, Ethel Neave (or, as she styled herself, Ethel Le Neve), was just an innocent girl swept away by passion. Theirs was a calculated plan that involved the cold-blooded removal of someone who happened to be in the way – the unfortunate Mrs Cora Crippen, or, as she was known on the music hall stage, Belle Elmore. She, rightly, is at the centre of this book.

‘No murderer should ever be the guardian of their victim’s story,’ declares the author at the outset. This is the story of a murder, not a murderer; it is told from the perspective not of Crippen but of the women in his life – in particular his second wife. Story