Crippen

London at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American doctor practising dubious patent medicine, lives unhappily with his wife Cora, a music-hall performer known as Belle Elmore. His affair with the younger Ethel Le Neve develops against Cora’s ambitions, financial demands and volatile marriage. When Cora disappears and human remains are found beneath the Crippens’ house, suspicion turns towards the apparently mild doctor.

Crippen and Ethel flee aboard the SS Montrose, disguising themselves as father and son, while Chief Inspector Walter Dew follows their progress through the new technology of wireless telegraphy. Boyne alternates the celebrated manhunt with the lives of passengers aboard the ship, turning a documented murder case into a study of performance, respectability and public fascination with crime. The historical verdict is retained, while motives, private conversations and emotional relationships are necessarily fictionalised.