A gripping and very detailed re-telling of the Crippen cause célèbre. Martin Edwards has clearly done his research and knows the case inside out, and it reads like a biographical account, as opposed to a fictionalised one. Edwards' denounmont fits with more recent forensic evidence that questions the long-held views of Crippen's guilt.

© Koplowitz 2011

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On the off-chance that I'm not the only person who's never heard of Hawley Crippen before I'll outline the basics. He was an American physician who was married to a woman called Cora who wanted a career as a singer. They lived in England together from the late 1890's but had an unhappy marriage. Crippen began an affair with one of his employees, a woman called Ethel Le Neve, and several years later (1910) Cora disappeared from Crippen's life suddenly. Cora's friends were skeptical of Crippen's explanation for Cora's disappearance and eventually got the police to investigate. Hawley and Ethel fled the country following their first interview with police which raised suspicions and sent the police in hot pursuit. Crippen was captured, tried, convicted of murder and subsequently executed. The case was one of the first to achieve worldwide media attention and, in recent times, Crippen's guilt has been disputed though not universally.

Dancing for the Hangman is a fictionalised account of Crippen's life leading up to the events of 1910. Although it is fictional, Edwards has researched the case thoroughly and makes use of original source material such as court transcripts, personal letters and contemporary newspaper articles. It felt to me as if Edwards had laid out as many indisputable facts as he could using this material, then creatively filled in the gaps with what might have happened. The resulting 'untrue crime' had me thoroughly hooked from the very beginning to the highly plausible solution which Edwards provides to the question of whether or not Crippen was guilty.

The story is told in flashback by Crippen as he awaits his death in Pentonville prison. The doctor is portrayed as a complex character. At times I sympathised with his naivety and the rotten luck he had in securing himself an unsuitable wife (no one seems to dispute her penchant for other men) but at other points he's quite delusional and, as he also spent much of his working life as little more than a quack, not entirely trustworthy. Since finishing the book I was curious enough to do a modicum of my own 'research' (i.e. googling) and see that a lot of the people who dispute Crippen's guilt seem to do so based on their assumption that a short, quiet man who could be very kind would never commit murder. However Edwards does a superb job of showing us how just such a man might have grown into a murderer. It always seems to me that in real life most domestic murders happen for exactly the kind of mundane reasons proposed in this book. Of course Edwards might have gotten it completely wrong but I wouldn't let that deter you because, either way, the book is genuinely intriguing.

Perhaps I was lucky that I came to this book with completely fresh eyes (or ears if we're being pedantic) but I imagine that even those who are more familiar with the case would be as entertained as I was by this superbly written tale. It is both impressive and slightly troubling to see just how well Martin Edwards has crawled inside the head of such a character to show the world from Hawley Crippen's point of view. If you're a fan of audio books I can heartily recommend Jeff Harding's evocative narration which added a final element of enjoyment for me. ( )

Martin Edwards begins with a true crime, taking the case of Dr. H. H. Crippen, hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife Cora. The jury was told how he poisoned his wife, then cut her body into bits, disposing of some parts as rubbish, and then burying the rest of it under the brick floor of the cellar of his house.
Crippen nearly eludes capture, escapes via a boat to Canada, and is then met on arrival by Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard.
Did he do it? Was it murder? Was he rightfully hanged?
I know I am echoing the thoughts of others in saying this is a strong and persuasive fictionalisation, cleverly crossing that enigmatic border between fact and fiction seamlessly. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about the Crippen case to really tell the fact from the fiction. Martin Edwards has added an epilogue in which he explains what he has done in answer to some of the lingering puzzles related to the Crippen case.

DANCING FOR THE HANGMAN is written from Hawley Crippen's point of view in 1909-1910 as he first of all awaits sentence and then execution. He and his second wife Ethel were accused of the murder of his first wife Cora. Martin Edwards fleshes out Crippen's life from his childhood onwards, his marriage to Cora and his relationship with her, and then how Ethel enters his life. Crippen comes over as a person who really doesn't understand the forces and people who govern his life. He is very conscious of his own inadequacies, particularly of how others might see him, but there is also something unwholesome and tawdry about the sexual games he and Cora liked to play. He often doesn't really recognise how he is manipulated by others, and in particular he sees Ethel through rose-tinted spectacles.

So in DANCING FOR THE HANGMAN where does fact stop and fiction start? I don't really know, and I guess it doesn't really matter. If I had thought it was "true crime" then I probably wouldn't have read it. ( )

This is a fictionalized account of the Crippen murder in 1910 London. The author did a decent job of fleshing out the historical facts, but I found it difficult to read. I didn't like any of the "characters", which is not really Edwards' fault, since I don't think the real people were particularly sympathetic. I just didn't care if Cora was murdered, or if Crippen and Esther were found to have done it.

There is no real suspense, since we know how the real case ended, so that element does not move the book along. To me, the narrative was choppy, so the story doesn't move along in that way either.

Maybe I am just not enough of a fan of historical murder novels. I suspect that those of you who really like this type of stories will rate this one higher than I have. ( )