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Writer Kate Colquhoun is the author of several non-fiction books, covering everything from murder to cookery, from architecture to gardening … although these latter were covered in the biography of Joseph Paxton. Her latest book Did She Kill Him? examines the infamous Florence and James Maybrick Victorian murder trial held at St. George’s Hall in 1889 and Kate is visiting Waterstones Liverpool One on Wednesday March 18th to talk about the book.
It is a little over a year since Did She Kill Him? was published. Have you been surprised by the positive reception it has received?
Most writers will, I think, say that they feel like frauds and that, however much they desire it, they cringe from praise, always believing that they could have ‘done it better’. But the thing about this story is that it has all the elements of gripping fiction: strong characters, striking geography, transgression, heightened emotion, mystery. I’ve done my job okay if I’ve communicated even half of the fascination I felt in researching it, in stitching the events of 125 years ago back together in a way that not only makes sense but makes us care.
This was quite possibly the first “big” case that the St George’s Hall Court had held. How much was the “celebrity status” of the trial, and also the grandeur of the surroundings, an initial influence on Sir Charles Russell taking the case?
Well we don’t know what influenced him to take the case as he left no letter or diary entry about it. It is rather astonishing that Florence Maybrick’s lawyer managed to get the most famous barrister in England at the time to defend her. Equally, sensational trials of this kind tended to be fought by a pretty small and close-knit group of men. Given how spent Russell was from defending Parnell, he may ultimately have been the wrong choice.
There were a great many “miscarriage of justice” cases you could have concentrated on in this period. What was it about Florence Maybrick that caught your attention?
I wanted, for once, to write about a woman and I enjoyed writing Mr Briggs’ Hat so much that I also wanted to write about another crime, albeit in a slightly different period. So often the people involved in these cases are two dimensional to us – there just isn’t enough information about them, or they aren’t ‘substantial’ enough to carry a wider discussion about society at the time. The fact that Florence was young, American, and very isolated made her almost a Henry James heroine and that interested me enormously: how much, I wanted to know, was this the kind of world of silent, suffocating emotional pain that, for example, Maggie Verver of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl inhabited? Once one started to peel back the layers of time, there was more and more about her, her milieu and Liverpool society of the time that simply caught me round the throat and demanded to be re-told.
With regards to your research, what was your starting point and how did you manage to separate the wheat from the chaff so as to maintain your focus?
The starting point is always primary record and – in this case – that meant the large boxes of Home Office material at the Public Record Office. Beyond that, geography is crucial to me so that I walked in, through, around the streets and buildings that would have been familiar to the Maybricks and in which these events played out. I always read widely around my subjects – all those newspapers, of course, but also novels, histories, tracts published around the same time. Then, as any writer will tell you, it’s as much about what you leave out as what you put in and to a great extent that’s instinct plus a process of honing, cutting and polishing.
There is a great deal of gender discrimination running through the case. Have things changed as far as the media and public perception is concerned?
Good question. I learned so much about proto-feminism from researching this book and it revised my own opinion about how far we have come. I started out believing that I have grown up in a world that’s pretty much equal. I find myself deposited on the other side of the book increasingly irritated about the fact that despite the enormous gains of the past century, ‘almost equal’ is just not good enough and progress for gender equality seems to have stalled. In legal terms – just as one example – we have fewer women in the judiciary here than in Azerbaijan or Armenia. I could go on…..
Moving away for a moment from crime, with The Thrifty Cookbook, you have 476 recipes consisting of leftovers. How many of these had you tried prior to publishing the book and what inspired the idea in the first place?
All of them. The book was a reworking of the way my grandmother, my mother and I cook. I did ask friends for their ideas too – so that some of the ideas from the Middle or Far East or Italy were new to me – but I tried them all out endlessly and only included the ones that my two children were happy to eat! The book grew in the aftermath of publishing Taste – once I’d researched 2000 of British culinary history and seen the graft to grow, nurture, process and cook food over all those centuries, the lack of waste, the natural thrift endemic to the past, I began to notice the amount we now throw away. Then I got involved with WRAP and began to campaign about the amount of food we bin – the how and the why – so that this little cookbook was a natural child of my frustration that we can all be so lazy and profligate.
What was the most surprising element of the Maybrick case that you discovered?
It’s impossible to answer except in it’s broadest sense that once you start to dig into history, turning over every stone several times, questioning your assumptions or those of others, what emerges is not the difference between them and us, but the similarities. All the history I write is designed to punch a hole in time and help us to hold hands so to speak with the past, so that we understand it a little more closely, more humanly. It’s a brilliant way not just of looking back but also forwards – there’s truth in at old sausage that you cant know who you are, or who you want to be, unless you understand where you have come from.
Do you enjoy events such as that which is taking place at Waterstones on Wednesday and what is it, do you think, that readers so fascinating about True Crime?.
Of course. The best thing about this whole process is how collaborative it is. When a new opinion is raised, or when my own interpretations are challenged it sharpens things. I think the fascination is threefold – one that in looking at the chaos of other people’s lives, we distance ourselves from it (it wont happen to me); next that we like to believe that there’s no such thing as a criminal mystery – that the forces of law and order will put things right, cauterise ‘evil’ and keep us safe; finally that we are simply, endlessly interested in the dirty laundry of other people’s lives and in history that remembers also to be human.
Can you give three pieces of advice to anybody wishing to undertake a project such as Did She Kill Him?
The best piece of advice for any writer is to read. Endlessly, widely, voraciously. It’s not just about information and fact but also about rhythm, tone, pace. For a historian it’s also pretty crucial tirelessly to seek out primary source material and never to rely on the opinions of the historians who have gone before – to start from scratch and be forensic about one’s research.
What’s next?
Something completely different. Not Victorian. Not crime. But I’m still seeking out the primar source pot of gold that will carry my idea so it wont be for a while.
Kate Colquhoun will be at Waterstones, Liverpool One, from 6:30 pm. Tickets £3 (£2 Concessions). Call 0151 709 9820 for Tickets