The Amazing Mrs Livesey - Freda Marnie Nicholls

Ethel Livesey was born in Manchester in 1897 as Florence Elizabeth Edith Swindells (an ironic name given her future career). She led a life of criminal deception & fraud. Married eight times, mostly bigamously, divorced five times, she had over forty aliases. Ethel (I'll call her Ethel as that was her most famous alias) was a sociopath who "couldn't lie straight in bed" as one of her victims said of her in court. She lived in a fantasy world where she was a famous film star or opera singer & often took her aliases from the names of famous people. She felt she was entitled to an easy life & she had no compunction about the means she used to achieve it. Freda Marnie Nicholls has written the book as faction, which is my one real problem with the telling of Ethel's story, but I'll come back to that.

Ethel's life of deception began when she married a young soldier, Alec Carter, in 1914. He was a few years older, a stationer who worked with his father. Alec enlisted in 1916 & went to the Front, leaving Ethel with his family in Manchester. Ethel was pregnant & soon became bored, especially as she disliked her in-laws. She was able to access Alec's pay by using a ring paper, which was given to the dependents of soldiers serving overseas. Instead of helping out with expenses at home, Ethel spent the money on clothes & partying. When Alec was reported missing in November 1916, Ethel took to her bed. She gave birth to a son, Frank, a few weeks later but refused to care for the baby. One night, she slipped out of the house & disappeared. She never saw her son again. Soon, Ethel was living with another soldier & was in court for the first time when a boarding house keeper reported them to the police for fraud. Ethel convinced the magistrate that she had been taken advantage of when ill & plied with drink. He believed her & the charge against her was dismissed.

Ethel married Ray Ward just a few months later, another soldier (bigamously as it turned out because Alec wasn't dead). She soon had two ring papers to draw on after meeting yet another soldier while Ray was on active service. She successfully juggled her two identities for a while but slipped up & ended up on a good behaviour bond. Ethel also made a practice of deceiving shopkeepers into giving her credit. She was attractive, well-spoken & confident. She had no compunction about obtaining clothes & jewellery on false pretences. I won't go through her whole career but at one time or another, Ethel stowed away on a cruise ship, attached herself to a vice-regal party by claiming to be an opera singer, pretended that she had entertained the Duke & Duchess of Windsor on the French Riviera, claimed to have nursed survivors of the Blitz during WWII, was connected to the famous Coats cotton family & married one man after another, usually without obtaining a divorce from the previous husband.

She spent time on the Isle of Man with Thomas Livesey & she changed her name by deed poll as his wife wouldn't divorce him. She convinced him to put all his assets in her name so that his wife couldn't access them & then walked out, taking everything with her. She even claimed to be the wife of an Australian Test cricketer. She had a few stints in prison for fraud & obtaining goods by deception but, when released, she just moved to a new town, adopted a new name & started all over again. The worst thing Ethel did was abandon her children. She had two children, Frank & Basil, when she was married to a man called Anderson. She would leave the boys, aged only six & five, for days at a time, leaving a shilling on the table for every day that she planned to be absent. One day, she just didn't come back. It was during the Depression & neighbours looked after the boys until Social Services took over.

Ethel's biggest crash came after her planned wedding to a Sydney civil servant, Rex Beach, was called off in spectacular circumstances. It was December 1945 & Ethel was spending the money she'd stolen from Thomas Livesey. The wedding was to be one of the social events of the season with extravagant amounts of money spent on food, flowers & the wedding dress. There was maximum publicity in the newspapers leading up to the event but, on the day of the wedding, Rex called it off after a friend alerted him to Ethel's past.Ethel was still being pursued for unpaid bills relating to the wedding years later. She eventually served more time in jail for fraud (there were outstanding warrants for her in most states of Australia) & then disappeared again after briefly reconnecting with her sons.

I read The Amazing Mrs Livesey in a day. I know it's a cliche but it's a real page-turner. However, I was disappointed at the author's decision to fictionalise parts of the narrative, making it faction instead of either fact or fiction. The Author's Note at the end of the book made it all even murkier.

Written as narrative or factional history, real people and actual events have been woven together with fictitious character names, and imagined conversations to bridge occasional gaps in the storyline or account for unnamed people.

I was expecting a non-fictional narrative & was surprised by the fictional scenes. I wish the Author's Note had been at the beginning of the book rather than the end. It was easy to see which chapters had been sourced in court documents & newspaper research & this was the part of the book I really enjoyed. Marnie Nicholls also writes that there were several stories where Ethel might have been the culprit but these couldn't be proved so she left them out. However, the story of the stowaway opera singer, also unverified, was too good a story to leave out! I suppose I was expecting a bit more intellectual honesty from a book marketed by the publishers as biography. I can understand why Marnie Nicholls didn't write a novel as the facts are just too unbelievable. I was reminded of Jane Austen's advice to her novel-writing niece, Anna,

"I have scratched out Sir Thos. from walking with the other men to the stables, &c. the very day after his breaking his arm - for, though I find your papa did walk out immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a book." (Letter. August 10th 1814)

No one would believe Ethel Livesey's story if it was written as fiction & I'm impressed by the amount of research that has gone into the book. Marnie Nicholls heard of the story from Ethel's granddaughter, who had done a little digging while searching for her father, Frank's, birth certificate. Frank had talked about his mother but was very bitter about her abandonment of him as a child. The most amazing find was a Cinesound newsreel that Ethel paid for in the aftermath of the abandoned wedding. The newsreel was shown in cinemas around Australia & featured Ethel proclaiming her innocence & pleading for understanding in her troubles. She also takes a swipe at "Sydney society" who have abandoned her. Ethel seems to have been a completely heartless, amoral woman who had no compunction about the shopkeepers she defrauded, the friends she stole from, the men she deceived or the children she abandoned. The most amazing thing about the amazing Mrs Livesey was that she managed to elude detection & keep deceiving people for as long as she did.

The Anatomy of Murder - The Detection Club

I'm not a fan of contemporary true crime, much too gruesome, but I do enjoy reading about historical mysteries. This book, The Anatomy of Murder, is one of a series of books originally published in the 1930s that have been recently reprinted. The authors, all well-known detective novelists in their time, were also members of the Detection Club, an institution still in existence today. The Detection Club's archivist, Martin Edwards, is a distinguished detective novelist & has written the Introduction to this book. Martin has also written a history of the Detection Club, The Golden Age of Murder, which is published next month.

The Anatomy of Murder explores seven murder mysteries from the Victorian period to the 1930s. There are well-known stories such as the murder of three year old Francis Saville Kent at Road Hill House (recently the subject of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale) (by John Rhode), the case of Adelaide Bartlett who was accused of poisoning her husband Edwin with chloroform (by Margaret Cole) & the murder of Julia Wallace (by Dorothy L Sayers).Then there's one that solved a bit of a puzzle for me. I'd always wondered who the Landru in the publisher's name Crippen & Landru was. Now I know. He was a Frenchman who, in the early 20th century, murdered at least a dozen women, leaving no trace of their existence. He chose his victims carefully, single women or widows with no family. He met them through the personal ads, looking to buy furniture, took them to his secluded country house & there, murdered them. How he disposed of the bodies isn't definitely known but these women were there one day & gone the next. It's a chilling story of a man with no remorse for what he had done. He never admitted his crimes & stayed calm throughout a lengthy investigation & trial.

The cases aren't confined to Europe. The first story, by Helen Simpson, is set in Australia in 1865. The story of Henry Kinder is a tale of a love triangle. Kinder was a heavy drinker & his death was first thought to be suicide. However, his wife's lover, Louis Bertrand, started making wild statements about the case & was eventually charged with Kinder's murder. Another case, in New Zealand, is the final story in the book. Freeman Wills Croft tells the story of the double murder of a sheep farmer, Samuel Lakey & his wife, Christobel. Christobel was found drowned in the dam on their property but this was obviously no accident. There was a wound on her face as though she had been knocked out & her body was found face down in the water, covered with sacks. The first idea was that Samuel had murdered his wife & fled, as he was nowhere to be found. However, through brilliant detective work & careful forensic examination of the crime scene, it became apparent that Samuel too had been murdered. The murderer's plan was clever but, as is often the case, just a few mistakes set the police on the right path. Proving it was the difficulty when physical evidence of Samuel's death was elusive.

My favourite chapter was on the murder of Julia Wallace, a case that, even today, is a cause of controversy. Just a couple of years ago, P D James came up with a new theory in the case (I haven't been able to read her article as it's behind a paywall but the main points of her theory are here). William Herbert Wallace was tried for the murder of his wife, Julia, in 1931. The case is baffling because, as Sayers writes, every fact can be interpreted in at least two ways. Wallace seemed to have no motive for the killing & his alibi was unusual. He was an insurance salesman & said that he had received a telephone message asking him to go to an address the next evening to meet a man about an insurance policy. The man & the address turned out to be fictitious but while Wallace was roaming around looking for this address, his wife, Julia, was battered to death in their home. Had Wallace himself made the phone call to establish an alibi or, had the murderer made the call to get Wallace out of the way?

Dorothy L Sayers looked at the case as a detective novelist & assessed the facts as if the story were a novel. The business with the phone call & the alibi is very like fiction but it was fact. The dilemma was in interpreting the facts. Wallace's behaviour - calling attention to himself repeatedly on the tram journey to the fictitious address, making sure his neighbours were with him when the body was discovered - could be interpreted as guilty or innocent. Witnesses who could have proved that Julia was alive after Wallace left the house were dismissed as mistaken or unreliable. If this had been a novel, Sayers or James would have been able to come down on one side or the other according to their plan but, in real life, it wasn't so easy. Wallace was acquitted but many people still believe him guilty & if he was innocent, the real murderer got away with his crime.

Frances Iles examines the Rattenbury case of 1935, where an elderly man was murdered by the lover of his much younger wife. Alma Rattenbury's case has been compared with that of Edith Thompson, who was hanged for the murder of her husband in similar circumstances even though she had not actually committed the murder or been aware of her lover's intentions. It was considered that Mrs Thompson was executed for adultery rather than murder & there was considerable sympathy for her at the time so Mrs Rattenbury's case was treated differently. As Iles says,

However, if it was the women of England who hanged Mrs Thompson, against all reason and all justice, then it was equally due to the women of England that Mrs Rattenbury was saved from the gallows; for if Mrs Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs Rattenbury surely would have been.

Alma Rattenbury's life was ruined by the trial & the publicity & she committed suicide shortly afterwards. Although there was really no mystery about the murder itself, as George Stoner wasn't clever enough to even try to hide his guilt, it was a landmark case in that the personal life of the people involved was excluded from deliberations of the Court. The judge in the Rattenbury trial was determined not to make the same mistakes as his colleague had in the Thompson case. No matter what the judge, lawyers or jury may have thought of the morals of the accused, they didn't allow it to influence their decision.

A new anthology of true crime writing by members of the Crime Writers' Association, Truly Criminal, is about to be published. It includes essays by Catherine Aird, Peter Lovesey & a newly discovered essay on the Wallace case by Margery Allingham. I'm looking forward to reading it.