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kcfromaustcrime's review
4.0
Gideon Haigh must like a challenge if the story of the murder of Mollie Dean is anything to go by. There's not a lot known about Mollie - during her lifetime, or sadly about her violent and vicious death. What little is known is gleaned from small clues left behind, a single photograph, some of her published writing, newspaper reporting and extrapolation of the contradicting societies in which she mixed.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA starts out concentrating on those societal aspects. Mollie Dean's life initially took the expected path of the daughter of a respected school teacher and a difficult mother, after a good education, she went into teaching, specialising, and succeeding, based on scant records, with special needs classes in particular. There are elements of her early life, however, that give some clues as to why she yearned to veer from that path. Her father died when she was young, and her mother was, by accounts of friends and family, an awful woman. Pushy, demanding and self-involved, her desperation to control Mollie (and her salary), right down, it would seem, to attempts to marry Mollie off to her own young lover, were obviously part of Mollie's longing for "a room of one's own". The echoes here with Virginia Woolf's essay are obviously relied on heavily by Haigh in drawing out a picture of a young woman, a would be writer and poet, who tries many times to remove herself from a toxic family, seeking comfort, acceptance and validation in the artistic and bohemian circle of artists and thinkers surrounding Max Meldrum and Mollie's own lover Colin Colahan.
Attempting to outline the world that Mollie was trying to find a way in, Haigh has done considerable work in identifying the leading figures in the group, outlining their complicated relationships - friendship and sexual - drawing a picture of two very different worlds. A home life blighted by an overbearing mother, who went so far as to have Mollie followed at times (not from care or concern but control), and the free, easy, and literate life of the artistic community. It's very easy to see how a young woman of that time would be drawn to the artistic group, drawn to life as the lover of a talented, albeit somewhat insipid sort of a man. All of that stacks up against the sad and vicious murder of Mollie, and what now seems to have been the disinterested way in which the investigation was treated.
Haigh approaches these books in a manner which reminds you of the lead of an investigation team. Using genealogical sources, public records source, police records and scant snippets of information gleaned from many sources, he pulls together pictures of the time, and the people. Obviously here he's very hamstrung in being able to draw a detailed picture of Mollie Dean and the murder investigation that commenced after her death because so little remains in the records about her and it. There's plenty of conclusions to be drawn from that, and Haigh, as in his last historical true crime book "Certain Admissions", leaves the reader to their own devices in that area. That lack of detail is probably going to be very frustrating for some readers, and for others, overwhelmingly instructive.
From this account it seems that Mollie Dean was a beautiful, clever, talented young woman who was keen to make a mark and achieve something in her life. Her life was taken from her in the most brutal of manners because somebody wanted to control that. Who did that and why, readers will have to decide for themselves.
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/scandal-bohemia-gideon-haigh
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA starts out concentrating on those societal aspects. Mollie Dean's life initially took the expected path of the daughter of a respected school teacher and a difficult mother, after a good education, she went into teaching, specialising, and succeeding, based on scant records, with special needs classes in particular. There are elements of her early life, however, that give some clues as to why she yearned to veer from that path. Her father died when she was young, and her mother was, by accounts of friends and family, an awful woman. Pushy, demanding and self-involved, her desperation to control Mollie (and her salary), right down, it would seem, to attempts to marry Mollie off to her own young lover, were obviously part of Mollie's longing for "a room of one's own". The echoes here with Virginia Woolf's essay are obviously relied on heavily by Haigh in drawing out a picture of a young woman, a would be writer and poet, who tries many times to remove herself from a toxic family, seeking comfort, acceptance and validation in the artistic and bohemian circle of artists and thinkers surrounding Max Meldrum and Mollie's own lover Colin Colahan.
Attempting to outline the world that Mollie was trying to find a way in, Haigh has done considerable work in identifying the leading figures in the group, outlining their complicated relationships - friendship and sexual - drawing a picture of two very different worlds. A home life blighted by an overbearing mother, who went so far as to have Mollie followed at times (not from care or concern but control), and the free, easy, and literate life of the artistic community. It's very easy to see how a young woman of that time would be drawn to the artistic group, drawn to life as the lover of a talented, albeit somewhat insipid sort of a man. All of that stacks up against the sad and vicious murder of Mollie, and what now seems to have been the disinterested way in which the investigation was treated.
Haigh approaches these books in a manner which reminds you of the lead of an investigation team. Using genealogical sources, public records source, police records and scant snippets of information gleaned from many sources, he pulls together pictures of the time, and the people. Obviously here he's very hamstrung in being able to draw a detailed picture of Mollie Dean and the murder investigation that commenced after her death because so little remains in the records about her and it. There's plenty of conclusions to be drawn from that, and Haigh, as in his last historical true crime book "Certain Admissions", leaves the reader to their own devices in that area. That lack of detail is probably going to be very frustrating for some readers, and for others, overwhelmingly instructive.
From this account it seems that Mollie Dean was a beautiful, clever, talented young woman who was keen to make a mark and achieve something in her life. Her life was taken from her in the most brutal of manners because somebody wanted to control that. Who did that and why, readers will have to decide for themselves.
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/scandal-bohemia-gideon-haigh
melbsreads's review
2.5
Trigger warnings: murder, rape, death of a child, cheating, abusive/controlling parent.
This book sounded absolutely fascinating and I was really hoping to be hooked from start to finish. Unfortunately, this was incredibly dry and I spent most of the time glaring at the criminology call number on the spine, because this is less true crime and more a history of the bohemian arts scene in Melbourne in 1930 and how the murder of one of their own changed the group dynamic.
I felt like maybe two or three chapters of this were actually dealing with the crime and the rest was just about the group of artists and writers that Mollie hung out with. All those artists were talked about as though the reader should know who they were - I didn't - and as though the reader should care about them in some way - I also didn't. I cared about Mollie, but we got so little of her that mostly I was bored. So very very bored. The writing was dry as a piece of bread left outside on a 47 degree day, and seeing as I couldn't give a flying fuck about the arts scene in Melbourne in 1930, this mostly left me flat.
This book sounded absolutely fascinating and I was really hoping to be hooked from start to finish. Unfortunately, this was incredibly dry and I spent most of the time glaring at the criminology call number on the spine, because this is less true crime and more a history of the bohemian arts scene in Melbourne in 1930 and how the murder of one of their own changed the group dynamic.
I felt like maybe two or three chapters of this were actually dealing with the crime and the rest was just about the group of artists and writers that Mollie hung out with. All those artists were talked about as though the reader should know who they were - I didn't - and as though the reader should care about them in some way - I also didn't. I cared about Mollie, but we got so little of her that mostly I was bored. So very very bored. The writing was dry as a piece of bread left outside on a 47 degree day, and seeing as I couldn't give a flying fuck about the arts scene in Melbourne in 1930, this mostly left me flat.
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