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 Fontunzelman. This is

the Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Perhaps the past is still largely undiscovered.

It still needs so many retroactive forces for its discovery.

Those lines quoted from Nietzsche by John Berger in his 1970 essay,

The Past Seen from a Possible Future, resonate with today's open book

as we explore two novels that grapple

with our history in order to rethink our present.

Later I'll be hearing about the extraordinary life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, a freed

slave and later prominent black activist in Georgian Britain, who inspired actor and writer

Patterson Joseph's new novel. But first, an author who is

as prophetic as he is prolific. When the Turkish Nobel laureate O'Han Pamuk was finishing his

novel Snow about the stirrings of political Islam in a remote Turkish village, the twin towers fell

in New York, and many, including Margaret Atwood, called the novel Eeriely Preciant.

Well now his latest book, Knights of Plague, has also been overtaken by world events.

The novel was published in Turkey last year and written over the past five. It's set on the

fictitious island of Mingaria in 1901 during the final days of the Ottoman Empire.

Opening as the plague takes hold, the daughter of a deposed sultan, Princess Pekise, her husband and a famous Polish Christian doctor,

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