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Well, said the heavily bandaged Countess of Lucan from her hospital bed,

eyeing her sister and brother-in-law with no great affection.

Now who's the one with paranoia, eh?

Forty years after the murder of the Lucuchin's nanny, Sandra Rivett, the answer is pretty much everybody. The events of the night

of the 7th of November 1974, when Rivet was bludgeon to death in the basement of the Lucan's

London House, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the Countess was violently assaulted,

and her husband John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes.

The story has the violent glamour of crime fiction with the additional thrill of reality,

and the facts are just enough to make a narrative, while leaving hugely tantalising

areas of doubt. Also, the Lucans looked right. He, the central casting aristocrat, dashing with

his guardsman's moustache and a hint of the cad round the eyes, she, tiny beside him,

buffin hair in a velvet band. There followed four decades of obsessive gossip,

conspiracy theories, sightings of the Earl on every continent except Antarctica, and grisly

accounts of his death, as well as some more thoughtful studies of the case and what it reveals

about post-war Britain and its social structure.

Thompson's book is a mixture of all these, and the result is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn't pull

because it has become a myth, and myths change with time. As the Lucan affair recedes to the horizon of living memory,

revelations and theories once libelous are now printable, while first-hand recollections become

clouded, and the pattern of light and shade in the story shifts. Some things have changed less

than might have been expected. While the press at the time called it the

upstairs-downstairs murder, there is no difficulty, as Thompson points out, in re-interpreting

...