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.

Despite once decreeing, partly in jest, that she left London for New York in order to avoid writing a historical novel,

Zadie Smith has now seemingly embraced her fate as an English author by writing her first.

The fraud comes almost two and a half decades after the literary sensation of her debut,

White Teeth, both the set in Smith's beloved home turf of northwest London. The fraud,

unlike its predecessor, however, brings to life the 19th century Kilburn of fields and country pubs

and of William Amesworth, a hugely popular writer in his day, now largely forgotten.

Smith's main character is Ainsworth's cousin and housekeeper, Eliza Touche, whose life is richly reimagined.

Her story is told against the backdrop of an 1860s court case concerning an East End butcher who claimed to be Sir Roger Titchbourne,

the heir to a huge estate and vast fortune.

But this is not the only fraudulence referred to in the title.

Instead, Smith uses her novel to ask big questions

about delusion, truth,

and our complicity in the lies we choose to turn away from.

The fraud is punctuated by appearances from other real-life historical figures, and despite

her stated intention absolutely not to allow herself to include Charles Dickens, he found

...