Fatal Fascination: A Choice of Crime

by Nigel Balchin (Contributor), C.S. Forester (Contributor), Eric Linklater (Contributor)

Anthology:
Burnt Njal –The Irredeemable Crime by N. Balchin
William Joyce by C.S. Forester
The Murder of Darnley by Eric Linklater
The Murder of the Duke of Enghien by Christopher Sykes.

Genres: True Crime

192 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

Trained originally as an industrial psychologist, in which capacity he helped Rowntree’s to successfully launch Black Magic chocolates in 1933, Nigel Balchin first received critical acclaim as a novelist during the Second World War when he wrote Darkness Falls From the Air. It was the first of three evocative novels (including the smash-hit The Small Back Room) that made good use of his wartime employment experiences at the Ministry of Food and later in the army. This trio was followed by a stream of other fine novels, such as A Sort of Traitors, Sundry Creditors and The Fall of the Sparrow. Balchin diversified into film scriptwriting after the war, winning a BAFTA for his work on The Man Who Never Was and penning what he whimsically described as “the first folio edition of Cleopatra”, being his original (unused) script for the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor epic. When Balchin died in 1970, at the age of 61, the Guardian anointed him “the novelist of men at work”, a fitting epithet for one of the best fiction writers of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 3 out of 5]

In some ways this was a tough book to read, because I am not really brushed up on my Napoleonic history, let alone the Icelandic Sagas -- the true-crime stories in here came from sources like those. The four authors did a valiant job of packing a great deal of information into their relatively short articles on some very interesting cases, but I wondered throughout how much of what I was reading was just a mid-twentieth-century take on cultural norms too far removed for the authors (or me) to understand. The exception of course was the case of William Joyce, but that article had an unfortunate tone of "you all know who and what I'm talking about because it's been so much in the news," when that has not been true for well over 50 years now. As Will Cuppy might point out, these stories point up the fact that Homo sapiens hasn't changed much since the late 800s.