Crime of passion
Sinclair McKay
The Fatal Passion
of Alma Rattenbury
by Sean O’Connor
Simon & Schuster, £20, pp. 474No matter how exquisitely English —
gobbets of blood amid the fireplace orna-
ments — murder annihilates meaning.
Even when the motive is clear and strong,
even when the progression to the fatal blow
can be analysed step by step, all that is left
amid the eviscerated lives of loved ones is
an emptiness around the violence itself.
In fiction, this void is filled: Agatha Christie
understood very well about hatred, and her
stories seethe with it. In 1935, as millions
of her readers were devouring Murder on
the Orient Express — a novel constructed
around a biblical act of molten vengeance
— the nation was suddenly mesmerised by
a real-life shocker: a weird and savage
killing in the genteel south-coast resort
of Bournemouth.
The incongruous setting was a house
called Villa Madeira, the apotheosis of
interwar respectability; the victim, Fran-
cis Rattenbury, was an architect in his late
sixties. He was in the sitting room after
everyone else had apparently retired to
bed; his skull was bashed in with a mallet.
Sean O’Connor’s meticulously researchedaccount of the murder and trial, the lurid
scandal and repercussive aftermath is
superbly evocative and gripping. But
this is not a whodunnit, nor even a why-
dunnit. Instead, it’s a book riven with intelli-
gent and compassionate ambiguity. The killer
was an 18-year-old boy, the lover of the vic-
tim’s wife, Alma. But this is where rational-
ity slips into elusive darkness; and O’Connor
dives deep into the most extraordinary psy-
chological mysteries, while also expertly
evoking the songs and the escapism, the cars,
shops, hotels and trains that filled the land-
scape of 1930s Britain.
Alma Rattenbury would have been
a vividly compelling figure even without
the shadow of murder. A brilliant pianist
and talented songwriter, she was brought
up in Canada at the turn of the century,
became a mother, then a young widow in the
first world war, and subsequently married
Rattenbury — known as ‘Ratz’ — who was
30 years her senior. She drank, took drugs
and lived expensively and vivaciously; but
she was also warm and generous and com-
pulsively romantic. After some calamitous
investments and hostile local politics in Can-
ada, Ratz, Alma and her two sons (the elder
from a previous marriage) moved to Britain.
By that time, the marriage was affectionate
but sexless, with the couple occupying sepa-
rate bedrooms.
The household in Bournemouth also
consisted of a maidservant, Irene, who was
devoted to her mistress; and later, a younglive-in chauffeur, George Percy Stoner, who
was even more devoted to her. This passion
was not merely reciprocated: Alma seemed
overwhelmed by her feelings for him. Every
night, with seemingly no fears about discre-
tion, the boy, known by all as Stoner, entered
Mrs Rattenbury’s bedroom by prior
arrangement and slept with her. If Ratz
knew, he never mentioned it.
Then one night came the explosion of
violence — Ratz sitting in his armchair
as Stoner crept in through the French
windows with a heavy mallet. Alma was
in bed, unsuspecting. Immediately after
the assault, Stoner went upstairs, got into
bed with her and, clearly in shock, almost
instantly told her what he had done —
motivated apparently by a spasm of con-
fused jealousy. What followed was an
extraordinary double murder trial, inwhich both Stoner and Alma faced the
prospect of the noose. The twist-filled story
inspired Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célè-
bre, and later found a perverse echo in Joe
Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane.
This is a narrative that builds with the
intensity of an approaching thunderstorm:
Alma’s passions seemingly in plain sight
and yet fundamentally unquantifiable —
an attractive woman condemned by society,
and yet also a source of addictive fascina-
tion to those professing shock. Then there
is Stoner, the handsome boy seen by the
public as an emblem of the lost generation
of boys from the first world war — a killer
whom newspaper readers seemed desper-
ate to redeem.
The horror of that night is powerful-
ly conveyed— the blood, Alma drinking
manically while determined to shield her
beloved from blame, the child upstairs
who knows instinctively that something
terrible has happened. But what follows
after the trial is even more affecting:
a Thomas Hardy tragedy thrown forward to
the 1930s.
In sensitive and affecting prose,
O’Connor tells a story not just of murder
but of the social and sexual limitations of
the time, against which imaginative men
and women could not help but push. From
the salt winds on lonely marshes to the soot
of London, from luxurious Kensington
hotels to condemned cells, an entire world
of oppression and defiant freedom is sum-
moned up. The murder itself remains head-
shakingly enigmatic, adding hugely to the
power of the book. The old man slumped
with his skull shattered suddenly has no
significance to the wider world beyond his
violent death, the meaning drained away
like blood.Cause célèbre:
Alma Rattenbury’s
trial for the murder
of her husband
in 1935 appalled
and enthralled the
English publicEvery night the boy entered
Mrs Rattenbury’s bedroom by prior
arrangement and slept with herGE
TTY
IM
AG
ES