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 Fondunzelman.

This is The Lucan Obsession.

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In his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nunn, William Faulkner wrote,

The Past is Never Dead. It's not even past. It's a much-quoted line. In fact, it turned

up again just last week in Prince Harry's memoir, a book you might possibly have heard about.

And that's perhaps because its accuracy is so often proven.

In today's program, we're looking at books set in the past that describe realities which

would have once been too controversial to write about, books that in some cases describe past

events that are still echoing in the present. We begin in California with Jane Smiley,

author of the Greenlanders, Some Luck, and the Pulitzer Prize winning A Thousand Acres.

In her new novel, A Dangerous Business, she takes us back to 1851 and her home of Monterey.

I began by asking her about that setting and how her character, Eliza, arrives there.

Well, when the Gold Rush first started, they discovered that there really wasn't much gold

around Monterey. And the prospects of Monterey becoming a very wealthy town were kind of slim.

...