THE FATAL PASSION OF ALMA RATTENBURY

When George Orwell, in his 1946 essay ‘The Decline of English Murder’, described the sort of domestic, middle-class murder that the English public loved to read about, he may as well have been describing the killing of Francis Rattenbury at his home in Bournemouth in 1935. It was one of the most infamous crimes of the decade. Rattenbury and his much younger wife, Alma, had moved from British Columbia to Britain to escape the scandal of their marriage (his second, her third); he was an architect and she was a talented and charismatic musician. They lived with a maid and a chauffeur, the 18-year-old George Stoner, who soon became Alma’s lover. One night, overcome by an irrational jealous impulse, Stoner bludgeoned Francis to death with a mallet as he sat, asleep, in his drawing room. The case became a sensation in the tabloids, with the press fascinated not only by the incidental details – Francis’s false teeth fell to the floor when he was struck, and Alma tried to put them back in so he could talk to her as he sat dying – but by the figure of Alma, the ‘mallet murderess’, and her supposed depravity.

The story has been told many times. Terence Rattigan drew on it for his 1975 play Cause Célèbre, as did Sarah Waters for her 2014 novel The

Paying Guests. Sean O’connor’s new book aims to place it within its social context. While Johanna ThomasCorr, writing in the Sunday Times, found O’connor’s continual digressions on ‘the rise of consumerism, the build-up to war, or how a housewife wore her pinny’ to be tiresome, other reviewers were far more impressed.

O’connor’s book ’stands apart from earlier accounts for the meticulousness of his research’, wrote Thomas Grant in the Times; in the Spectator, Sinclair Mckay called the book ‘superbly evocative and gripping’: O’connor tells ‘in sensitive and affecting prose’ a story ‘not just of murder but of the social and sexual limitations of the time’.