I'm not really what you might call a fan of true crime books, but Paul Spicer's The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice de Janzé and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll caught my eye when I was browsing on Amazon recently (note--my copy is a library book, I didn't cave in and buy anything--patting self on back). I do like a good biography, however, and anything about the 1920s through the war years often will be of interest to me. This happens to be not only a biography of an American socialite and heiress but also a recounting of a crime that occurred in 1941 in Kenya.
"Happy Valley" (happy referring to the high altitude of the Wanjohi Valley) was quite the hotspot in the 1920s. All sorts of partying and decadence went on there during the off hours from farming. Josslyn Hay, the earl of Erroll, was a well known fixture and a serious womanizer in the valley. He arrived in Africa in 1923 with his slightly older and already twice-divorced wife, Lady Idina Gordon. She's the topic of The Bolter by Frances Osborne, which I have on my shelves but hadn't realized the connection when I started reading the Spicer book. By the time Joss was murdered in 1941 he had been divorced and widowed and had been playing the field for some time. It was assumed that a cuckolded husband was the most likely murderer and someone was tried for the crime but not convicted.
Paul Spicer spent his childhood in Kenya and now divides his time between Kenya and England. His connection and interest in Alice's life comes through his mother, also an American, who was a close friend of Alice's. Although the murder of Joss Hay remains unsolved, Spicer offers his own solution, and guess who is the culprit? I think I am less interested in the murder and who killed Hay and more curious about reading about such an intriguing woman and the period and place in which she lived. I'm sure I'll write more about this book as I go, but I wanted to share a little teaser about the "temptress" herself:
"She was a woman who suffered throughout her life from the demons of melancholy, and who tried to take her own life on a number of occasions. Alongside this dark streak, however, was a vein of impetuous and often reckless daring. As a young heiress, she quickly tired of the Chicago debutante scene and began to explore the Jazz Age nightclubs of the city, starting up an affair with a local mobster. After being banished to Paris by her family, she took a job at a French fashion house by day, cutting a swath through the city's clubs and cafés by night. It was in France that she won her independence from her family when she married Frédéric, the sensitive, intellectual count who took her to Africa to help cure her of her unhappiness. After only a few months in Kenya, she decided to build a home there, leaving her two young children in France, too fearful of being a bad mother to grace them with more than the occasional visit. In Africa, her marriage to Frédéric fell apart after she started affairs with the two men who would become her great loves, Joss and her second husband, Raymund de Trafford."
Seriously scandalous dealings, wouldn't you say? There's much to be said about living the quiet life, but it's always a little interesting to see how the other half lives.