Books in the Media: Hallie Rubenhold sets the record straight
This week non-fiction triumphed with standout titles from Hallie Rubenhold and Ian Leslie.
Historian Rubenhold’s Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen (Doubleday) was called a “thoughtful, humane and gripping book” by Dominic Sandbrook at the Sunday Times. In Story of a Murder Rubenhold recasts the 1910 murder by Dr Crippen by placing the women that he killed, Charlotte Crippen and Belle Elmore, at the centre of the narrative. “No murderer should ever be the guardian of their victim’s story, and yet this is the role that Hawley Harvey Crippen has always held,” wrote Rubenhold. Sandbrook noted: “This is a true-crime narrative that is not just a cracking story, but also a window on to social history.” In an interview with Rubenhold, The Bookseller’s Caroline Sanderson called Story of a Murder a “triumph”.
Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar (Hodderscape) was selected in the Financial Times’ round-up of new crime stories by Barry Forshaw. Hodgson’s fantasy-crime cross-over is a “complex, inventive (and notably weighty) whodunnit”. Forshaw added: “Hodgson is one of our finest historical crime novelists, so you may find it worth investigating her ingeniously invented society even if you are resistant to fantasy”. In an interview with Hodgson, The Bookseller called The Raven Scholar “a joy for any hardened fantasy reader, but also an entry point for new readers”.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs (Faber), a “brilliant study of the Beatles’ music” and of the “songwriting partnership” between John Lennon and Paul McCartney by Leslie, was selected as the book of the week by Anthony Quinn, writing for the Observer. “Leslie scores highest in his penetrating analysis of the differences that drove their creative alchemy”, wrote Quinn. The Financial Times’ Simon Schama called John & Paul “revelatory”, an “analytically sharp, vaultingly written book”. For Schama, Leslie “is such a brilliant writer, by turns poetically exuberant and musically analytical”. Writing for the New Statesman, Deborah Levy called the book an “empathetic and enjoyable literary equivalent of a biopic, or perhaps psychoo-pic”. She continued: “And it is a great story, particularly about boys and men, post-Second World War Britain, fame, friendship and jealously, structured around the songs Paul and John wrote separately and together”. The Bookseller’s Sanderson said: “With all its twists and turns, Leslie beautifully and movingly charts their love story, which began when they met as Liverpool teenagers in 1957, and ended only with Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.”
Claire Baglin’s “piercing first novel” On the Clock (Daunt), translated by Jordan Stump, examines “the toll that backbreaking, labour-intensive, low-wage work takes on those who do it,” wrote Lucy Scholes at the Telegraph. The novel’s narrator has taken a job over the summer at a fast-food restaurant “and is struggling to adapt to being a cog in its machine”. Her narrative is interleaved with her father, Jérôme’s, work as an electrician in a factory. “Baglin never loses focus on the damage these jobs inflict on ordinary people’s bodies: here, labour is steeped in imagery akin to that of war,” wrote Scholes, adding that Baglin’s prose “beautifully translated by Jordan Stump – is as crisp as the fries fresh from the oil”. “If you’re thinking this one’s not for you, think again. It’s one of the paciest and most gripping pieces of prose I’ve encountered in a while – and a lesson to us all.”
