I’m sorry to flood you with book reviews, but I did read a lot on holiday. Just scroll down the page for coursework, or search in the categories tab on the right.
To this day the story that forms the basis of this novel by Muriel Spark remains one of Britain’s most celebrated murder mysteries: on the night of Nov. 7, 1974, the night his wife was assaulted and the family nanny brutally murdered, Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, mysteriously vanished; it was rumoured that he was aided and abetted in his flight from the authorities by wealthy aristocratic friends, and there were occasional unconfirmed sightings of him around the world.
In this chilling novel, ”Lucky” Lucan, or a man pretending to be him, turns up in Paris in the office of a psychiatrist named Hildegard Wolf. She is immediately suspicious, for she already has a patient named Walker who claims to be Lord Lucan. Why aren’t the two would-be earls worried that Hildegard will turn them in to the police? Both men, it seems, have the means to blackmail the doctor: they know that she once posed as a religious healer who once a month smeared her hands with menstrual blood and pretended to be a stigmatic. They know that she rooked hundreds of poor believers out of their carefully hoarded savings. And they know that she has been on the run for years, having methodically reinvented herself as Dr. Wolf.
The whole thing is a black comedy as the characters plot against one another: the two Lucans secretly conniving one against the other even as they both pursue Hildegard, who disappears from Paris and takes up with an amateur sleuth who is determined to track down Lord Lucan.
Hildegard is just as ruthless as Lucan; as the novel progresses, the parallels between Hildegard and Lucan become increasingly clear: both are in flight from a terrible crime; both have spent much of their adult lives inventing new identities for themselves; and both, so to speak, have blood on their hands.
This glitteringly icy tale has one major flaw in my opinion: it is never made clear how the two Lucans discovered Hildegard’s well-disguised secret, and, even more unlikely, whether they each managed to expose the secret separately. Nevertheless it keeps the reader on the hook right to the end. And it is also a grimly satirical exposé of aristocratic mores.
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