Harry Hall Dances for the Hangman (January 2009)
Photographer Harry Hall has had his work publish once more, this time courtesy of the author Martin Edwards. Working with Flambard Press, Art Evolution supplied the stunning image ‘Sand Ridge for the authors latest novel, Dancing for the Hangman.
Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer based in the North West of England. He has written two acclaimed series of crime novels, one set in Liverpool and the other in the Lake District. Martin was so taken by the image that he purchased a signed limited edition print of the work for his Cheshire home.
Dancing for the Hangman is his first historical novel. It is an account of the life and misadventures of Hawley Harvey Crippen, and although it is a work of fiction, it sticks closely to the established facts of a real life case.
The centenary of Hawley Harvey Crippen’s hanging is now just two years away. The Edwardian jury took a mere twenty-seven minutes to decide that Crippen had murdered and mutilated his missing wife and compel the judge to impose the death penalty. Crippen’s wife was a failed vaudevillian whose stage name was Belle Elmore; after her career fell apart, she earned herself the nickname of ‘the Hustler’, as a charity fund-raiser for the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. When she vanished suddenly, her colleagues in the Guild turned into a collective whose nosiness would put Miss Marple to shame, they were so determined to learn the fate of their friend. They interrogated Crippen remorselessly about her whereabouts.
His accounts of what had happened to her became more and more bizarre – sometimes quite hilarious, for there is definitely an air of macabre comedy about the whole Crippen saga. Eventually the Guild ladies reported Belle’s disappearance to Scotland Yard. Inspector Dew went out to interrogate Crippen, and his secretary (and mistress) Ethel Le Neve, and took such a liking to ‘the little man’ that he took him out for lunch. But Crippen panicked and ran off to the Continent, accompanied by Ethel disguised as a boy. Dew searched Crippen’s house and found fragments of human flesh under their cellar. The head of the corpse was never found…….
March 23, 2009 8:38pm
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