I am reviewing these two together as they are about the same events: the real life death of James Maybrick who died of strychnine poisoning and his American wife, Florence Maybrick, who was convicted of murdering him in 1889. Apparently, being a foreignor who was considered far too "flash" for English life, Florence was despised by everyone, including her own husband. The case gripped the nation and everyone was divided on the question of her legal and moral guilt. She was released after serving 14 years and managed to get back to the States where she lived a relatively quiet life (devoting herself to prison reform under her maiden name) in Connecticut in a small home with her many cats.
Marjorie Bowen, writing under the pseudonym of Joseph Shearing, published her book in 1943, two years after Florence Maybrick died. Berkeley published his book in 1926. The two books are so unalike that I was about one third the way into Berkeley's book before I realized that he was writing about the same case. His story is flippant, and his main character, Roger Sheringham, is a bit of a smart aleck. He gads about town, working with two side kicks (his best friend and that guy's cousin), interviewing various people who know the family and have strong opinions about the woman accused of murdering her husband. It's amusing enough, but not particularly intellectually satisfying.
Then along comes Bowen's story which is SO emotionally deep and rich, I could barely stand to read it. The story is told sort of from the point of view of the fallen woman, but sort of over her shoulder--we are not in her head and so do not know her thoughts, but we are very close to her and so know of her actions and feelings, given how she reacts to what goes on around her. In this novel she is French and extremely young--marrying at only 18 years old a man who is in his late 40s and who wants her as a sort of prize--a thing to have--because he knows that having a young, beautiful and helpless wife will advance his business contacts and so wealth. He's a thoroughly loathesome man who has many mistresses, spends all his time at his "club" and at the races betting so badly he'd be better off setting his money on fire. He also loves to "dose himself": convinced he is smarter than all doctors, he regularly (and by that I mean hourly) takes drinks with strychnine mixed in because he is convinced it makes him stronger, smarter and more virile. It does none of those things.
Meanwhile, there is a collection of borderline useless servants in the house because the husband is too cheap to hire competent help---so they break and steal things and blame the wife, and conspire with the husband against the wife. (There are frequent hushed and giggly conversations with a evil maid who loves to snitch on the wife to the husband in exchange for being groped and a few coins.) Meanwhile, the wife doesn't KNOW any of this is going on, but she is very aware that she is the outsider--like the new kid in junior high that isn't accepted into any established clique and is the victim of unfunny pranks that the other kids find hilarious. As you can imagine, it's extremely painful to read---which shows just how well it is written.
And there is the husband's younger brother who hates the brother because (a) he knows he'd run the business better but because he is younger, he was never given the chance; (b) he knows he'd be a better husband and yearns to find a way to make his sister in law his wife; (c) he hates how ugly, clumsy, awkward and offensive his brother his because he knows that behavior alienates the family from the best society circles.
Once we know all the players and their motives, the scheming begins: Husband wants rid of his wife who is no longer young and pretty but just sad and lusterless as a result of being in a loveless marriage for ten years; brother wants rid of husband because he wants both the business and his wife; maid wants rid of wife because she has convinced herself that she'd replace the wife (she won't, but she doesn't know that); mistress wants rid of wife--and maybe the husband, too, but she says she doesn't...and wife wants out at any cost and has told her doctor (believing she had his confidence but she doesn't because the husband pays the doctor's bills) that she wants "her money" (the money she brought to the marriage) so she can go back to Paris and be happy again, even if it means still being married to an oaf who wastes money on strychnine. (Unbeknownst to her, there is nothing left of "her money" because her husband gambled it all away.)
And, unsurprisingly, things come to a head with husband is found dead with enough strynchnine in his system to kill a horse. And since he lied to everyone about his "dosing" (except his wife), no one believes her when she says he "dosed himself with poison every hour on the hour" because it's so obviously a stupid thing for him to do. And with that, we are about 2/3 of the way through the novel and that gets you to the arrest and trial--which I will not go into other than to say if you thought the household staff could be cruel, add in journalists, lawyers and police and you get even worse cruelty....
I guess this is a murder mystery, but it is really so much more. It's an amazingly well written albeit extremely SAD novel and I'm amazed I had never heard of it before or of Marjorie Bowman, who really knows how to tell a story. And given that she'd written dozen of novels, that means there are a lot more really sad books of hers to read.
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