The world of splashy, sensational true crime and celebrities has always been a gold mine for storytellers. This week’s book club features three new works that look at the supposed suicide of a wonder of the art world, the kidnapping that may have inspired Nabokov’s Lolita, and the sham trial of a Victorian music hall star turned countess. Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction; sometimes, it just inspires it.
<em>An Accidental Corpse</em>
Harrison is no stranger to mystery (An Exquisite Corpse: Death in Surrealist New York) and the world of Jackson Pollock as the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Having written several non-fiction books on the artist, she turns her eye to the end of his life, when, in 1956, the artist crashed his Oldsmobile into a tree. Thought to be a drunk driving accident, it killed Pollock and one of the two young female passengers in his car, Edith Metzger. The other young woman, Edith’s roommate Ruth Kligman, was injured but survived. She also happened to be Pollock’s mistress of a few months. Harrison reimagines this straightforward tragedy into a high-stakes murder mystery.
<em><a data-affiliate-link="" href="https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Stardust-Novel-T-Greenwood/dp/1250164192?tag=bm01f-20" rel="noskim" target="_blank">Rust & Stardust</a></em>
According to Greenwood, the 1948 real-life story of 11-year-old Sally Horner’s kidnapping and disappearance from Camden, N.J. proved the catalyst for Vladimir Nabokov’s terrifyingly popular Lolita. Greenwood hopes that writing this version will give Sally’s tale her own voice, so she doesn’t just become “a footnote to someone else’s story.”
<em>Becoming Belle</em>
“Isabel only needed to be forty miles from Aldershot in order to unlock liberty. In the six weeks she spent alone in London, waiting for Flo to join her, she began to have a life. Once the curtain closed at the Empire, her nights were a whirl of the Pelican Club and the Café Royal, and wherever else the crowd was keen to spend time. There was sparkling company in the form of fellow performers, directors and assorted theater folk. Aristocrats and bohemians, city men and night birds of every stripe flocked together. These were hedonists: they drank all night and slumbered by day, the better to enjoy the next night’s party and the next….She could bend her hours to whatever shape she wished, and keep company with any motley troop, and society be hung.”