KHAKI MISCHIEF

Memsahibs weren't supposed to murder their husbands. Freemasons weren't supposed to murder their Brothers. Over tiffin and tea, on the verandah, in the Club, all British India gossiped about the shocking trials of the Englishwoman and her doctor-lover, who was part-Indian. Augusta Fullam had committed the sin that dared not speak its name — letting the side down. Recognised as a truly classic crime, the Fullam-Clark case, a double murder emanating from a passionate love affair, has never before been fully studied; in Molly Whittington-Egan, a qualified solicitor blessed with a keen sense of farce, Augusta Fullam has found a biographer able to interpret and evoke not only the tragedies and the legal ramifications of the case, but also the complexities of the characters involved — Clark, the rogue constantly hovering on the borders of denunciation and disgrace; Augusta, the shallow, self-indulgent temptress who attracted retribution through her own vanity. Daughter of a respected Bengal River Pilot, Augusta was a bored wife and mother when, in 1909, she met Henry Clark, a doctor with a wife and five children of his own. Five years later, both couples were dead, and the children scattered to foster homes and live hidden from the glare of publicity. In between lay the years of secret assignations and of a correspondence heavy with passion and the dark undercurrents of a ruthless conspiracy. Rich in the atmosphere of the Raj at the height of its powers, Khaki Mischief is indispensable to collectors of true crime, it remedies the omission of the case from the Notable British Trials series and is also a model of clarity on its demonstration of the Indian Penal Code. Above all, it will be enjoyed for its powerful evocation of a woman who let sex be her master and transgressed the rules of the Raj.