John Boyne Crippen

Crippen

John Boyne

Dunne, Mar 2006, $24.95, 352 pp.

ISBN: 0312343582

In 1910 Camden, England, Scotland Yard Detective Walter Dew feels somewhat ill as he looks over the crime scene in the cellar of a family house. The victim is Bella Crippen, a former music hall singer under her maiden name Elmore before she married Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. The obvious prime suspect is the husband, but he is nowhere in sight. A witness recognized jewelry that Crippen's female companion, who was not his wife, wore that belonged to Bella. The sleuth assumes Crippen is on the lam, though possibly also dead, if by some remote chance he is not the killer.

At the same time that Walter heads the homicide investigation, in Antwerp, Belgium, Mr. John Robinson and his teenage son Edmund board the passenger ship SS Montrose to traverse the three thousand plus miles of the Atlantic to Quebec, Canada. In fact, John is actually Hawley, and Edmund is his lover Ethel LeNeve. Neither realize as they try to limit contact with the crew and other passengers, that Dew continues to follow their trail.

CRIPPEN is an intriguing historical fictionalized account of a real sensationalized, at the time, love-murder triangle. The tale moves back and forth between the present (circ. 1910) and the late nineteenth century childhood of the title character. Though the insight into the pre-homicide Hawley is fascinating, that subplot also slows down an interesting Scotland Yard investigation. Still fans will gain insight into late Victorian and Edwardian England, as well as what motivated Crippen to kill his wife and run off with his lover in an apparent crime of passion. Readers will appreciate this deep Edwardian tale, but struggle between the two appealing segues that take away from each other.