James Ruddick: Death at the Priory

Ruddick, James (2001), Death at the Priory, Atlantic
ISBN 1-903809-44-4

The Charles Bravo case is a well-known mystery for True Crime enthusiasts. You may have encountered it in one of the countless books or TV shows that explore its details. In 1876, Charles Bravo died of poisoning, and four suspects emerged: his wife Florence (in her second marriage), her housekeeper, her former lover (a distinguished doctor), and a former stableman. None of them were convicted of the murder, but their complex sexual histories were exposed. Agatha Christie called it “one of the most mysterious poisoning cases ever recorded.” The case remains unsolved to this day, and James Ruddick’s book is not a definitive answer, but an (at the time) new addition to the ongoing speculation. This review will be brief, as I have no intention of reading the other 20 books on the subject. I should also note that this book is mainly for those who are unfamiliar with the case, or only know it superficially. If you have already read more than 2000 words on it, or watched a TV show that came out after this book, you can skip it. Ruddick’s writing is good, and the structure is excellent, but the main merit of this book is the presentation and organization of the facts. This is no Alias Grace, but a concise 200-page account of a fascinating case.

That said, if you, like me, are new to the cause Charles Bravo – this is an intriguing entry into the historical True Crime canon. There are some drawbacks to the book – the story of a woman’s desperation, repeated abuse, and rape at the hands of two different husbands, and her potential decision to clear up this situation by poisoning the second of the two should not have been written by a white male writer who isn’t particularly attuned to the situation (although he tries). But it is rare to read a book that is written with such a supple and readable prose, while at the same time keeping a tight lid on the proceedings. There is a little narration, a little psychological speculation, and quite a bit of in situ self inserts – but at 200 pages, we are offered the full facts of the case, and a broad (if occasionally misleading) summary of the various theories. Ruddick’s final explanation isn’t different from others already offered, but if you are new to the subject, it makes for engrossing reading, you get a sense of the entire situation, and Ruddick’s personal biases, though enormous and unstated, are so incredibly glaring that they do not block the view of the entire situation.

I will not go into the details of the case and the motives for suspecting any of the usual culprits. But Ruddick’s treatment of the two main suspects reveals his biases. They are the widow and her loyal servant. Ruddick, writing in 2001, provides a sympathetic context for the hardships of Victorian women. He frequently mentions the abuse they endured, especially Florence, Bravo’s widow, and their lack of options. He repeats these contexts after his conclusion. For Ruddick, misogynist abuse is woven into the story. Yet, we read about Florence being raped repeatedly, without Ruddick ever calling it that explicitly. He depicts different types of marital sexual intercourse, but they are all forcible rape, meant to dominate Florence. He even implies that Florence was raped to coerce her into marrying Charles Bravo. His failure to label every sexual act between Bravo and Florence as rape creates complexity and ambiguity where there is none. And there is more: during her first (abusive) marriage, in her 20s, Florence receives treatment, and soon starts an affair with James Gully, the sexagenarian doctor who runs the facility. Florence describes this relationship as consensual, but the ambiguity about the power abuse in the second marriage casts doubt on Ruddick’s ability to assess the consent in this affair.

Here as everywhere else, Ruddick is hesitant to offer a truly fundamental critique of the situation, which also blocks him from seeing other motives for Florence’s housekeeper Jane Cox. Her motives historically tend to be viewed as financial in nature, and Ruddick deals with that, but the alternative is entirely ignored. That alternative consists in seeing her mistress raped regularly and seeing her switch from a situation with dubious consent to a situation with no sexual consent whatsoever, which might work as motivation for someone with a strong sense of community and care. In fact, the connection between the two women, which entirely escaped James Ruddick, is so woven into the material that Shirley Jackson, whose novel We have always lived in the castle is inspired by the Bravo murder case, was troubled by the possibility of having written a lesbian narrative. Ruth Franklin, in her excellent memoir of Jackson, cites a letter, in which Jackson refers to that possibility as a fear of being seen (even by herself) as a lesbian. “[The novel] is about my being afraid and afraid to say so.” Jackson, unintentionally, saw a deeper connection in the case than Ruddick, despite his stated years of research in archives.

That said, the biggest blind spot to the book isn’t in the analysis of the case in the strict sense at all. It is in the overall contextualizing of the sexual politics of it. This would be a bigger essay – but there are some odd asides that Ruddick never follows up on. Jane Cox, the housekeeper, eventually inherits a huge plantation in Jamaica. And she’s not the only character with a family connection to the West Indies. Ruddick, towards the end of the book has a brief chuckle about some coincidences: “The family of James Gully, for instance, owned coffee plantations near Kingston, Jamaica, while Charles Bravo’s family had originated in Kingston and had made their money from exporting the coffee grown by Gully’s grandparents. Later, the Bravos had moved to St Ann’s Bay, which eventually became the home of Mrs Cox and her children.” To Ruddick, this is “random and without meaning.” So of the characters in the book 2 of the 3 men Florence sleeps with are from Jamaica, as well as her housekeeper, commonly seen as a linchpin in the murder. It is incredible that Ruddick at no point discusses the sexual politics of colonialism, the structure and function of colonialist violence as it impacts the bodies of those who are its subjects. And how partaking in colonialism in a colony might affect, change, or determine the mindset of the colonizer as well. To offer that short little paragraph as a summary of funny “coincidences” is incredible.

I don’t think it matters, ultimately, who pulled the trigger, so to say (there’s also a suicide theory, which, if I understand the internet correctly, Ruddick represents very badly and incompletely) – the book, which prides itself on offering a lot of contexts, given the paucity of information available, subtracts from the story the most relevant questions. The way Charles Bravo uses impregnation through rape as a weapon to acquire the fortune of the rich widow Florence is impossible to examine without recourse to the context of his origins in Jamaica. His reaction to the other man in Florence’s life is empty without connection to their shared beginnings in colonialist exploitation in the West Indies. And the role of Jane Cox has to be analyzed in connection with her roots and understanding of the sexual politics of colonialism. A book that has a curiously apropos connection to A Death in the Priory is Jean Rhys’ rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys gives us a white immigrant from Jamaica, daughter of impoverished former planters, who is driven to madness by her English husband. The psychology of Antoinette, her situation with regard to class and race, as well as her connection to Grace Poole all offer examples of a complex conversation the ingredients of which are right there in the Charles Bravo murder case.

None of this is offered by Ruddick, who, instead, includes a photo of “the author search[ing] for Cox’s descendants in the West Indies.” His bias is enormous and almost offensively obvious, but because it is so obvious, it does not entirely erase the accomplishments of the book as outlined earlier. He doesn’t obfuscate or hide these biases, and, as with many other books, you just have to do some additional work of your own to level and contextualize his theories. There are many problems with this book, but within the broader context of historical True Crime as a genre, most of which is bad, gullible trash, this is quite decent for what it is. If you don’t know the case, it’s a good read  – and a good jumping off point for more reading.

Leonardo Sciascia: Equal Danger

Sciascia, Leonardo (2003, 1971), Equal Danger, NYRB
[Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke]
ISBN 9781590170625 

In my previous review of a Sciascia novel, the brilliant To Each His Own, I made an embarrassing mistake – I compared the vibe of the novel with that of a favorite movie of mine, , going on and on about the similarities in how they view power, corruption and the pervasiveness of the Mafia. That movie, Cadaveri Eccellenti, does have many similarities with the Sciascia novel – but that is to be expected, as it is, in fact, based on another novel by the very same writer, as I found out last autumn. How have I not known that a favorite movie of mine is based on a novel? So I went ahead and read the novel – Il Contesto, translated as Equal Danger by Adrienne Foulke and published in a reliably gorgeous edition by NYRB books. Equal Danger is set, as are most of Sciascia’s books (with some notable exceptions, like his book on the Moro Affair), in Sicily, but the difference to To Each His Own is its exact setting and timing. Equal Danger is an urban novel, and a direct discussion of political intrigue, rather than an indirect fable of village politics that Sciascia uses to shine a light on wider politics. It is also, fascinatingly, less tightly written than the previous novel, despite the grittier genre it’s placed in. Whereas the previous book was narrowly focused on the intrigue at its center, and the unraveling of village life, Equal Danger is filled with diversions and allusions to literature and philosophy. There is even a multi-page poem that serves to display a character’s political and social views. And yet, between the allusions and the notes on literature and culture, the screws of political intrigue keep tightening, as a murderer uses the corrupt gaps in Sicilian policing to go after all the judges and lawyers that he blames for an unjust jail sentence.

Sciascia’s trick in the novel is to treat the murderer the same way he treats the corrupt conspiracy at the center of the book – we barely see either, we see bits and pieces, fleeting glances, mostly from the consequences of their presence rather than the presence itself. At some point, Sciascia’s protagonist, Inspector Rogas, remembers a proof of God in the form of finite but incomplete knowledge, Borges’ “Argumentum Ornithologicum” – and the same mental operation applies both to the corruption as well as the murderer. I am not spoiling the book here – this is not a whodunnit. This is a book about knowledge and the ways you go about discovering, treating, and organizing it. We’re told that Inspector Rogas has a bad reputation among his colleagues: he’s “a man of letters,” a reputation gained from his unusually well written reports, his acquaintances among writers and journalists, and his general bookishness. In fact, Rogas’ bookishness cannot be reduced to the usual caricature of a well read man – where other writers like to name every single canonical book and writer their protagonist has read, in a performative show of erudition, Sciascia only occasionally names writers and books precisely. The Borgesian proof is only fleetingly attributed to Borges, just offered as a quote; similarly, at some point, Rogas remembers a phrase from a “tedious, famous Italian novel” – and never once mentions that it is I promessi sposi, Alessandro Manzoni’s 19^th century classic, which is usually translated in English as The Betrothed (most recently by Michael Moore in 2022). These quotes or allusions serve less as signposts for the novel and its plot; instead, Sciascia replicates for us the workings of his protagonist’s mind – a bookish person, who organizes the world according to the structures and organizations he knows.

Inspector Rogas, in fact, has an orderly mind, and is at odds with the world around him, which is often unreliable, disorderly, dishonest and dangerous. At one point, he’s mentally thinking about the police archive, to access a photograph – but he immediately remembers the disrepair of the archives : “….and there flashed into his mind the recollection of what disorder and neglect reigned over things that were preserved and cared for.” If this quote strikes you as curiously elevated for something occasioned by the thoughts of trial manuscripts and police evidence, you are correct, because Rogas continues: “how relatively easy it was to remove from historical archives a decree of Charles VI or a note of General Carco, and from court archives the bound copy of trial proceedings.” He is proven right, of course, about the state of the court archives, but this passage demonstrates more – here, as in other books, particularly his historical novels, Sciascia is at pains to stress the historical continuity between the malaise of present day Sicily and historical Sicily, the way archives and knowledge are subject to the whims of the political will of the present. Rogas has difficulties shining a light on what is happening, but not for want of seeing clearly. It’s not the compilation of knowledge that’s the problem – it is the dissemination and preservation of it. Rogas comes upon the identity of the murderer fairly quickly, through systematic inquiry and thought. But it is the matter of everything else that increasingly eludes him. There is a political will to pin the murders on someone else, and while nobody explicitly prevents him from his job, Rogas keeps running into hindrances and barriers. People lie, dissemble, send him on wrong paths – paths he knows will not lead anywhere, in fact. This is underlined by the state of mind Rogas has upon writing up one of his reports – it is laced with ironies that will not be understood by those that read it, but only by historians interested in archives.

Among all the digressions and disquisitions, the most important one comes late – it is a discussion with a judge. The judge, who was part of the system that unjustly jailed a man, does not believe in judicial mistakes, as he says: “Whether an accused man may or may not have committed the crime has never had any importance for judges.” Truth is not helpful in establishing and maintaining a certain order: “confession of a misdeed on the part of someone who has not committed it establishes what I call the circuit of legitimacy.” It is “objective proofs” that lead to mistakes, he closes. This is central not only in establishing a baseline for how justice works in the world of the novel – it also prefigures the way the book will end. Not wanting to spoil the ending, what is important here is that the end of the basic plot is not the end of the book. Instead, we are granted a re-interpretation of the ending, a re-contextualization into the political and narrative necessities of Sciascia’s present day politics.

And this is why the judge’s speech is also a focal point of Cadaveri Eccelenti, Francesco Rosi’s movie adaptation of Sciascia’s novel. Many of the interior workings of Rogas’ mind did not make it onto the screen, understandably. We understand as viewers that Rogas is systematic and competent, but his fundamental bookishness is left behind on the pages of the book. The movie is more interested in the political corruption, and in fact expands on it – the novel was published in 1971, and the movie came out in 1976. In between was the rise of the so-called Years of Lead, which Sciascia could only suspect and hint at. The movie expands on the corruption by making the behavior of Rogas’ superiors more explicit, more contemptible, and by turning the tentative wiretaps of Sciascia’s novel into full video surveillance. Where we suspect the turn in events by following Rogas in the novel, the movie makes us feel the oppression and the violence of the capricious corruption of power at every point. The novel and the movie are both masterpieces, and are each perfectly adapted to their medium. The book, with its focus on archives, writing and narrative, and the movie, with its focus on surveillance, sounds, and the inescapable weight of the punitive gaze of power.

Sciascia’s afterword offers the anxiety, fear, even, of publishing such an outspoken condemnation of his contemporary situation. Indeed, he suggests the book may not even be about Sicily. It may be a book about an imaginary country. Even the movie, then, although it is unable to divert its gaze from the reality of Sicily, represents the final movie in Francesco Rosi’s cine inchieste (investigative cinema) series of movies. It is the last movie of Rosi’s great dark investigations of the mafia on the silver screen, and while Rosi would go on to shoot more classical movies, it seems apropos that Cadaveri Eccelenti, a movie about the difficulty of saying something objective and provable about the Mafia, based on a novel about the same difficulty, by a writer who appended a note explaining his very real fears to his own novel, would be a kind of end point for Rosi.