There is nothing more gripping than a crime like Lord Lucan’s
Human beings are fascinated by crime. The death of Lady Lucan will generate not only loss for those who loved her, but also another opportunity for the rest of us to muse upon the grisly, captivating event that, in the end, defined her life. Few such cases so mark our cultural consciousness. Just what makes them so compelling?
It is, as they say, all about the story, especially when that story has at its heart an unsolved mystery. But it’s not just the mystery that is intoxicating. As the decades pass, the murder of the Lucans’ nanny, Sandra Rivett, and the subsequent disappearance of Lord Lucan, has become wrapped up in something else too – the aura of a past not impossibly distant but rather; look over your shoulder and you might glimpse it as recent. The Lucan case is imbued with the flavour of the early Seventies and class: the smell of cigarette smoke and the stir of a martini, casinos and, one suspects, louche entitlement. It’s riveting.
No wonder readers devour crime fiction, making it the publishing world’s most popular genre. Television commissioners too are perpetually seeking another twist on the formula. Scandi noir? Done it. A touch of the supernatural? Been there. The misunderstood, tortured maverick detective? Again?
These days however, true crime is at least as popular as fiction. This used to be a grubby fascination, typified in a certain type of magazine with a sinister cover promising the reader a new solution to an old mystery – not quite on the top shelf but hovering in the region. Then it became mainstream (largely because of the success of the CSI programmes), so much so that many more schoolleavers are signing up for degrees in forensic science.
The most involving cases demand that we get to the bottom of the puzzle. They scream that there must be a solution, that someone must know what happened. Hence, modernday crime writers turn their labyrinthine minds to old, unsolved mysteries, attempting finally to answer the question.
Patricia Cornwell did it with Jack the Ripper; PD James reconstructed the Ratcliffe Highway murders in The Maul and the Pear Tree. Kate Summerscale’s retelling of the Constance Kent story heralded a new high in the historical crime reconstruction canon. And in doing so they did discover something new – that it is not just the killer’s identity we are looking for, but the back story and what happened next too. In the Lord Lucan case, it is precisely the aftermath that holds us. What did happen on the next page?
For writers and storytellers immersing their narratives in these crimes, the risks are high. Playing with mystery – holding out the whodunnit – poses a question that keeps the reader turning the page late into the night. But will the denouement be satisfying enough to justify such devotion?
The greater the mystery, the more dramatic the resolution required. Which is why, in the end, the greatest crime stories of all can only disappoint when they are solved: when Jack the Ripper’s identity is revealed, when Lord Lucan’s prosaic end is confirmed. For those at the centre of such tales, like Lady Lucan, not knowing exactly what happened must be a kind of torture. But the rest of us know that the best murder mysteries are never solved.