B007M836FY EBOK (43 page)
Authors: Kate Summerscale
‘The address … wd be sufficient.’
Letter EWL to GC, 13 Apr 1858.
Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008, winner of the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama. Her first book, the bestselling
The Queen of Whale Cay
, won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. Kate Summerscale has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize. She lives in London.
The Queen of Whale Cay The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Also available by Kate Summerscale
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Or The Murder at Road Hill House
‘A beautiful piece, written with great lucidity and respect for the reader, and with immaculate restraint. A classic, to my mind, of the finest documentary writing’ John le Carré Summer, 1860. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, travels to Road Hill House in Wiltshire with the task of solving a gruesome murder case in which members of the grieving family are the suspects.
The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes provokes national hysteria throughout Victorian England, but when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.
A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery.
‘Nothing less than a masterpiece’ Craig Brown,
Mail on Sunday ‘Terrific’ Ian Rankin
‘A page-turning merging of scrupulous research with vivid storytelling’
Observer
The Queen of Whale Cay
The Extraordinary Story of ‘Joe’ Carstairs, the Fastest Woman on Water
‘A wonderful account of a truly extraordinary life’
Mail on Sunday Born in 1900 to a promiscuous American oil heiress and a British army captain, Marion Barbara Carstairs realised very early on that she was not like most little girls.
Liberated by war work in WWI, Marion reinvented herself as Joe, and quickly went on to establish herself as a leading light of the fashionable lesbian demi-monde. She dressed in men’s clothes, smoked cigars and cheroots, tattooed her arms, and became Britain’s most celebrated female speed-boat racer – the ‘fastest woman on water’.
Yet Joe tired of the limelight in 1934, and retired to the Bahamian Island of Whale Cay. There she fashioned her own self-sufficient kingdom, where she hosted riotous parties which boasted Hollywood actresses and British royalty among their guests. Although her lovers included screen sirens such as Marlene Dietrich, the real love of Joe’s life was a small boy-doll named Lord Tod Wadley, to whom she remained devoted throughout her remarkable life. She died, aged 93, in 1993.
‘She was crazy and brave and her story is jaw-droppingly amazing … Great stuff’
Daily Mail ‘A small jewel of a biography’
The New Yorker ‘A fascinating, hilarious and deliciously subversive book’
Literary Review
www.bloomsbury.com/katesummerscale
First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by Kate Summerscale
Title page illustration,
A Wife
by Sir John Everett Millais,
Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library
Family trees by Phillip Beresford
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 1241 9
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Table of Contents
1 Here I may gaze and dream
2 Poor dear Doddy
3 The silent spider
4 My imagination heated as though with realities
5 And I knew that I was watched
6 The future horrible
7 Impure proceedings
8 I have lost every thing
9 Burn that book, and be happy!
10 An insane tenderness
11 A great ditch of poison
12 The verdict
13 In dreams that cannot be laid
Coda: Do you also pause to pity?
List of lawyers in the Robinson Divorce Trial