Hallie Rubenhold is an award-winning historian and author whose book The Five took the world by storm. Following on from this worldwide success, her new book, Story of a Murder is just as brilliant, just as meticulously researched, and just as difficult to put down. We caught up with her at Chalkle History Festival to find out more.
Tell me about your latest book, Story of a Murder. What's it about?
Story of a Murder is a re-examination of the murder of Belle Elmore by Doctor Crippen, her husband, in 1910. Crippen was a homeopathist, and an American. His wife, Belle Elmore, was a musical performer. He murdered her, cut her body into pieces and put it under the brickwork of his home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in Holloway, London. And then he ran away with what we would today call his 'PA' - but at the time she was known as a 'lady typist' - Ethel Le Neve. They dressed as father and son, escaped to Belgium and then got a ship to Canada. They were caught by Marconi Wireless when the captain of the Montrose, which they were on, recognised their faces from the newspaper and wired it to Scotland Yard. Inspector Dew got on a faster ship and met them in Canada, and there was a huge media storm surrounding the story. It was front page news.
But my book goes into a lot more detail. The rest of the story is about the Edwardian era, and it's about the women who were involved with Crippen - Belle Elmore, the wife he killed; his first wife, Charlotte Bell (rather confusingly!), who was an Irish immigrant to the United States, and who died under very suspicious circumstances; Ethel, who is a really interesting person and certainly an accomplice, although she was acquitted; and the Music Hall Ladies Guild, a group of extraordinary women who basically brought Doctor Crippen to justice.
Usually the story has been told from Crippen's perspective, and you flip it. How difficult was it to move away from the standard male-led narrative, in terms of evidence?
The news reports and witness statements helped. This book was two years late because of Covid: I signed the contract just before we went into lockdown. So instead of being able to visit the archives, which were closed, I spent so much time on digitised newspaper websites - the British Newspaper Archive and newspapers.com are utterly wonderful - and I found more stuff than anybody's ever found before. I combed through absolutely everything, and realised that Doctor Crippen had been involved in so many dodgy things. A weekly paper called Truth called him up on a number of things, like the Drouet Institute that peddled fake patent medicines, which he was involved with. All of the reprobates involved in that scattered to the wind after the Institute collapsed, but Truth followed their shenanigans - although Crippen escaped serious investigation.
So are newspapers your favourite source for finding information?
I have to say I am a real lover of the censuses. I'm just fascinated, and really, really nerdy about them. I haven't found anybody else who loves the censuses as much as I do, but it's like a whole puzzle, like a whole world just emerges from these things - particularly when you combine the information with the birth and death records, the workhouse records, the social housing records, the education records, and you start putting it together, like points on a map of a life. With the census, you know where somebody lived, who lived in their house with them, what jobs they did, where they came from, and who lived next door to them and on the other side of them. You know what shops were in their area and what factories there were. You have a complete sense of what that person's experience in life was like, what the physical world was like, so you can recreate those things.
When I was filling out the recent census, it was a really interesting experience. I was thinking, 'How reflective is this of my life?' In a hundred years' time, if somebody were to get my census and try to reconstruct my life, they could tell a whole story about it really easily - and it would be representative.
Do you think there are any things that they would get really wrong?
Not if they're a good historian. There's a difference between being a good historian and being somebody who embellishes. And fine: I love embellishing too – when I'm writing fiction. But if you're a historian, I think the important thing is to say, 'Okay, this happened. We don't know what else happened around it. But there are influencing factors and so here are all of those possibilities.' I think when it gets really tricky is when people - and this is often what amateur students of Jack the Ripper do - take something they think happened, and then overshoot with the possibilities. They could say 'Why couldn't a UFO have come down and taken her away?' There is a world where the possibilities all align and then you can jump beyond that and realise it's not really probable: we just don't have the evidence to support a leap like that.
You've gone down quite a dark route with Story of a Murder and also with the victims of Jack the Ripper. What led you particularly to that darker side of history?
I use crime as a lens through which we can understand history, because the wonderful thing about a crime is it's a freeze frame. It's a snapshot of what was happening at a certain time in a certain place: you have lots of witness statements, you have the court case. There is a lot of evidence and people talk about things like what they were wearing, what they saw, what they were doing on that day, their thoughts about things. You get this real sense of the world. You can drill into that and, as a social historian, that is fabulous. Also, social history takes you into the dark side of things. I've never bought into the headline history, the sort of stories that are all about kings and queens and wars. It's interesting, but you never do anything other than skim the surface. History is about people, fundamentally. And if you're not looking at how people lived and what they thought and who they were as individuals and connecting with that, I don't understand what the point of history is.
Can it be a bit ghoulish at times?
True crime is a funny thing because I come at it from a different perspective than most people: I come at it as a historian. I'm interested in it because a crime throws up an enormous amount of really exciting evidence, whereas I think some people come at true crime because they want to be an armchair CID, and that's fine, but if you are genuinely interested, do a criminology degree or join the police. True crime can cross over into some unethical territory, but that's a whole different conversation!
Do you have plans for another book?
I have just sold the rights to my next book, Sea of Darkness, which is about Titanic - but as an immigrant ship. It's all told from the perspective of the third class and examining why people were getting on Titanic in 1912. What people don't realise is that the majority of people aboard were migrants, and that Titanic was designed as much as an immigrant ship as a luxury liner. So, I'm following a handful of people from various parts of Europe and the Middle East through their experience. And you don't know whether they live or die until you read it. Then some of them have after-stories in the United States, so we see what happens when they get there.
You seem to have this knack of finding stories that capture the public imagination. Is it a sixth sense or is it just you being interested?
It has to interest me, but I really feel fundamentally in my bones that we should all try to tell a different story. As a historian and being a postgrad, it was drilled into me not to write something unless it's original. I don't need to rehash somebody else's ideas. And actually, it is exciting coming up with new theories about things. And I always think, 'What do we think we know that we don't know?' It's because we do the obvious things so frequently that a lot of history is lazy. People don't ask the right questions. And sometimes, we get caught up in mythology so much that we don't actually look beyond that.
If you could talk to one 'ordinary' person from history, what sort of person would they be, when would they come from, and what would you ask them?
If this is allowed, I would talk to Ethel Le Neve because I just wondered how the hell she kept these secrets for as long as she did, and what she was thinking.
You can buy Story of a Murder by Hallie Rubenhold here.
Image © Sarah Blackie
