By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, March 6, 2006

CRIPPEN

A Novel of Murder

By John Boyne

Thomas Dunne. 337 pp. $24.95

The Irish writer John Boyne's grimly fascinating new novel is based on the Hawley Harvey Crippen murder case, which delighted and scandalized Londoners in 1910. Boyne starts with the basic facts -- Dr. Crippen's wife's body (most of it) is found buried in their basement, whereupon Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard pursues the doctor and his lover in a dramatic chase across the Atlantic -- but he has altered the story to suit his dramatic needs and authorial whims. The result of his reinvention is a dark comedy that is supremely readable, always suspenseful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and, finally, a monumental piece of misogyny. In Boyne's sardonic telling, Cora Crippen was a monster who richly deserved to die, and her long-suffering husband was a man more sinned against than sinning.

Boyne provides a well-crafted three-part narrative. At the outset, a man calling himself John Robinson, accompanied by his teenage son Edmund, boards the SS Montrose in Antwerp on July 20, 1910, bound for Quebec. Soon we learn that they are in fact Dr. Crippen traveling with his lover, Ethel LeNeve, disguised as a boy, and as the voyage unfolds other passengers suspect their ruse. This voyage alternates with flashbacks to Crippen's childhood, his ill-starred medical career and his disastrous marriage to Cora, a crude, vulgar, violent woman who aspires to be a famous music hall singer, and also with the story of Inspector Dew's discovery of Cora's remains and his pursuit of the fugitive lovers.

Crippen was raised in Michigan by a religious-fanatic mother who bitterly opposed his dream of being a doctor because, she insisted, if God makes people sick he wants them to stay sick. The youth escaped his mother but, lacking the money for medical school, had to settle for mail-order diplomas and a marginal career as a salesman of medical supplies and herbal remedies, although he did master the art of dismemberment while working at a slaughterhouse.

Despite his setbacks, he calls himself Dr. Crippen, and that title impresses Cora Turner, a stocky 17-year-old singer in a music hall who thinks his income can speed her way to fame. Crippen, for his part, is dazzled by her sexual prowess. As Boyne succinctly puts it, "They married and were both disappointed with the results." Cora becomes a harridan. She insists that they move to London, where she believes her musical destiny awaits. Neither prospers there. Crippen for a time sets himself up as a dentist and in one scene almost kills a lad: "Milburn screamed throughout the whole procedure, blood-curdling screams, the screams of the demented and the hysterical; but Hawley hardly heard a note of them, so intent was he on his work."

As Cora's frustrations grow, her behavior worsens. She attacks her husband with her fists and a frying pan. She refuses him sex, but takes in young boarders and sleeps with them almost under his nose. When she rather improbably cultivates some rich friends, she insults Hawley in front of them, calling him useless and a failure and questioning his manhood. All this drives the poor fellow into the arms of Ethel LeNeve, his sweet-natured young secretary, whose boyish figure contrasts favorably with Cora's heft. When the lovers flee on the Montrose, with Ethel disguised as Edmund, complications arise. An overbearing and overweight English matron insists on cultivating Mr. Robinson, and her sex-crazed daughter attempts to seduce Edmund, deciding in the process that girls are more fun than boys.

Real events provide a dramatic conclusion. Once the lovers set sail, the captain of the Montrose, who has read newspaper accounts of the butchered wife and the missing lovers, uses the era's newest technology, Marconi's wireless telegraph, to inform Scotland Yard that they are aboard. Inspector Dew boards another, faster ship, the Laurentic, determined to apprehend the pair before they can disappear in the wilds of Canada. Thanks to the wireless and a tabloid frenzy that has transformed a phony doctor, a talentless singer and a mousy secretary into glamorous figures, thousands of people line the docks in Quebec, hoping to see the mad, possibly cannibalistic killer paraded before them. Will the Laurentic overtake the Montrose? Will the lovers escape? If captured, will they both hang?

It's a good story, and Boyne is right to play it for laughs, but I think he overplays his hand. There's hardly a decent soul in this novel. Women are monsters of hypocrisy who marry men for their money, deceive them, bleed them dry and wish them dead. Children are vicious little creatures who torment animals and attack people with knives. Men are mostly fools. If the story has a hero, it is Inspector Dew, but he's duped by Crippen the first time they meet, and after the chase begins he laps up his newfound celebrity -- there's talk of a knighthood. Few people are physically attractive. Cora has a face like "a hungry rodent," a landlord's eyes dart about "like a rat searching for cheese" and even Inspector Dew sees children "scurrying around the deck like rats." It is bad enough that, in real life, Cora's severed head was not found ("Every child and urchin in London was opening dustbins and looking in sewers for signs of it"), but in Boyne's telling we know exactly what ghastly fate awaits it. Boyne provides plenty of thrills, chills, ironies and surprises -- even meek little Ethel is not what she first appears -- but he takes his misogyny too far. Satire is fine, but eventually all these loathsome creatures cease to amuse.