DID SHE KILL HIM?

The mystery of what happened in the summer of 1889 "beneath the skin of propriety and manners” at a British mansion.

In this true story that created headlines in both the U.K. and the United States, Colquhoun (Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing, 2011, etc.) fulsomely describes the privileged lives of Liverpool's high society in Victorian England and introduces the principals as less than virtuous: Florence Maybrick was "vain, impatient and tiresomely self-absorbed as a spoiled child,” and her wealthy husband, James, “turned out to be faithless and morose.” Yet with these flawed, mostly unsympathetic characters, the author tells an engrossing story. James habitually consumed nostrums and tinctures containing strychnine, hydrochloric acid and arsenic (not uncommon in the late 1880s) and regularly used arsenic as a "general prophylactic against disease.” However, when he died suspiciously two years after marrying Florence, the question became, did his wife, nearly 25 years his junior, poison him, or was his self-medication the cause? Colquhoun presents comprehensive—to a fault—accounts of all the legal proceedings using court transcriptions and newspaper accounts, and she devotes dozens of pages to courtroom testimony from doctors, nurses and coroners about the amount of arsenic they could only guess was in James’ body at the time of his death. (The two-page list of characters at the end should help readers who become confused.) Though Colquhoun focuses closely on her story, some readers, drawn into the narrative, may draw parallels from this “Maybrick mania” to the current coverage of sensational cases. Throughout the narrative, the author makes use of a variety of antiquated words and phrases, none more delightful than her description of the "tatterdemalion viragoes" outside the courthouse "hiss[ing] their opprobrium.”

An intriguing story told in the style of Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, if they traded in true crime.