A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan
by Laura Thompson
May rating: 5 out of 5 stars
The collective public memory of Lord Lucan's disappearance in 1975 still lingers for many. As the prime suspect in the murder of his estranged wife's nanny, Sandra Rivett, at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, Belgravia, London, he was widely believed to have fled Britian, with alleged sightings in almost every global nook and cranny.
For years tabloids
theorised about changes of identity, including by plastic surgery. Bizarre reported
whereabouts ranged from to Colombia, to Gabo in Central Africa, to
"Treetops" in Kenya.
Bogus claims flooded in, including by a bounty hunter hoaxer who had previously
kidnapped train Robber Ronnie Biggs.
Cases of
mistaken identity filled headlines for decades, including that of a pensioner
in Brisbane, Australia, a homeless British expat in New Zealand, an
American businessman in Colombia, a Merseyside folk singer slumming it in singer Goa, India, and British
politician John Stonehouse, who had tried to fake his own death in Miami
but was found and arrested in Melbourne, Australia.
And yet Richard
John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan,
was never found, and the inquest into Sandra's death remains open.
Prior to gambling
away everything, neglecting his marriage and getting himself into this almighty
mess, Lucan was described by some as a real-life embodiment of James Bond - the
man with everything, looks, wealth, good breeding and great future potential.
Then he screwed up everything, vanished and became a myth.
In fact, early drafts of the 2006 motion picture Casino
Royale began with James Bond (Daniel Craig) backpacking in Madagascar and
playing chess with a drunkard hinted to be the chronically fugitive Lord Lucan
lying low in Africa. Lucan has been fodder across all media for half a century.
But no written non-fiction piece has come close to being as meticulously
fleshed out as this one, IMHO.
Laura
Thompson's forensic deep dive into the case takes us through the timing of
events, the settings, histories and genealogies of characters involved (including
the exclusive Clermont Club's infamous 'Lucan set' of gamblers), each of their
character peculiarities and the protracted investigation and its players – from
Lucan's elite 'circle' to the streetwise police and detectives.
At a
whopping 448 printed pages, no stone is left unturned.
All possible
motives are picked through with a fine-tooth comb. Common conspiracy theories
are untangled, facts are laid bare and the reader is left to decide for
themselves what was what on that fatal November night, when blood-soaked Lady
Lucan ran into the Plumbers Arms at the end of her street and cried: 'Help
me, help me, I've just escaped from being murdered! My children, my children,
he's murdered my nanny!'
The Lucans having endured a traumatic custody battle over
their children, had been on barely speaking terms, as Lord Lucan simmered and
stewed over his wife ending up with their house and offspring while he kipped
in a flat nearby. The increasingly obsessed Lucan had begun spying on his wife
and recording their telephone conversations. Devastating legal expenses,
combined with his habitual gambling losses, had made one mighty hole in his finances,
and he had a huge axe to grind against his wife Veronica.
She, according to general consensus, was the murder target
but, hidden in darkness, her not dissimilar looking nanny, Sandra Rivett, heading
downstairs to make tea on what would have been her usual night off, was
bludgeoned to death and her corpse shoved into a sack.
When tea failed to arrive and Veronica went looking for
Sandra, she was attacked by Lord Lucan, with whom she engaged in a brief fight
before succumbing to his orders to head upstairs and form a plan of action.
While he was looking away, Veronica fled the scene and the rest is history.
Lucan, expected at the Clermont at 11:00 pm, failed to
arrive and did not answer his telephone. He called his mother the dowager
countess late that night, speaking of a 'terrible catastrophe' and asking her
to collect the children from his wife's house. He told his mother he had been
passing the house when he saw Veronica fighting with a man in the basement. He
had entered the property and found his wife screaming.
In a moonlit drive in a borrowed Ford Corsair borrowed from his
friend Michael stoop, Lucan rushed 68 km to his friends the Maxwell-Scotts'
home in Uckfield, East Sussex, his last official sighting. The abandoned Corsair
was found two days later in the port town of Newhaven, about 26 km from
Uckfield, in its boot a piece of lead pipe covered in surgical tape and a
bottle of vodka.
Some close acquaintances believed that Lucan, guilty of
Rivett's murder, committed suicide by scuttling his motorboat and jumping into
the English Channel with a weight tied to his body, with some opining
a passing ferry must have chopped him up. Others thought he may have been aided
out of the country by dodgy financiers before being deemed too great a risk,
killed, and buried in Switzerland.
After his sensational 1974 disappearance at age almost forty, Lucan
was formally declared dead 27 October 1999, albeit without definitive evidence
for the official conclusion.
Several tellings of this fascination episode of history have
reached us, including the 1994 alternative history TV film The
Trial of Lord Lucan, the 1998 film Bloodlines: Legacy of a
Lord, the two-part 2013 miniseries Lucan, as well as a notable ten-part
BBC 4 Radio podcast The Lucan Obsession, and Hazell Ward's 2025
mystery novel The Game is Murder.
This book, by one of my favourite biographers Laura
Thompson, teases out every possible hypothetical scenario of this notoriously unsolved
true crime: whether Lucan hired a hitman to kill his wife but who botched the
job by getting the nanny instead; whether there were two attackers; whether
Lucan was an innocent (or stalking) passer-by caught up in things trying to
rescue his wife, then fleeing to escape predictable blame; even hinting at
whether Lady Lucan herself could had killed Rivett to frame her husband, citing
her fragile mental state and evidence of her blood, as well as Rivett's at the
murder scene.
The introduction, A Brief History of Murder, According to
Social Class, offers an insightful framing of what's to come, examining society's
stereotyping of villainy versus respectability, and the differing judicial
treatment Britain's privileged classes have been served compared with the
common rogue. I skipped this and read it at the end.
Like other Laura Thompson books, this one has that
flexibility, of the order being seemingly interchangeable. This liberating way
of reading I have always favoured.
Smoothly divided into three parts, the main body of the book
explores The Lucan Myth, The Story, and The Investigation. As with many such
works, and being already acquainted with the basic history by having been a
young adult at the time of the main events and following it in the news, I perversely
read this account in my own order, starting in this case at Part III, The
Investigation. I then stepped back to Part II, The Story, and finally Part I,
The Lucan Myth.
We find the same scenarios repeated throughout, but from the
different perspectives of the various people involved before, during and after the
central event. The often widely differing quotes and comments of the players in
this drama are at times priceless, peppered with parvenu snobbery, highborn
noblesse oblige and blue-collar publican, nanny and cop-shop patter.
As always, Thompson's wry observations of the human condition and the
ladder games of society are astute and often hilarious.
The end Appendices are extraordinarily detailed and
informative and include a studiously set out Lucan family tree, an
indispensable reference point to flick back to throughout as we read about
these people.
A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan follows
some of my other favourite Laura Thompson biographies of intriguing historical
figures, including Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford the Biography (2003);
Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (2007); Take Six Girls: The
lives of the Mitford sisters (2016) and Rex v Edith: A Tale of Two
Murders (2018).
I will read this again. Maybe in order next time, maybe not, but either way I'll re-consume. Enthralling subject matter, deftly crafted by one of the best at the top of her game. A thoroughly enjoyable escape into a world long gone and a mystery never solved.
