On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for Lucan.

It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime.

I'm Alex von Tundselman.

This is The Lucan Obsession.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, today, fiction, music and the places in between.

The sultry nights and bright hot days of summer are music season.

I date my own musical awakening to the summer of 1989 and the Stone Rose's first album,

the sound of Manchester, of youth, of longings and yearnings,

spilling from windows, car radios, and boom boxes. I couldn't make out all the lyrics, I still

can't, but the feelings they gave me I also found in James Baldwin's novel, Another Country,

and the writings of Dylan Thomas, and in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Musician and novelist Claire Coder and the writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce

are here to talk about the relationship between prose and music.

But we begin with one of our most diverse and interesting novelists, Benjamin Myers.

His subjects range from coin-clipping gangsters in 18th century Calderdale

to love and poetry in a post-war summer on the northeast coast, to St Cuthbert, his novel,

...