Almost a century later, some believe that Rattenbury’s ghost haunts the Legislature and the Empress Hotel which he also designed.
If you’ve ever doubted that crime, particularly murder, is high entertainment, doubt no more. Crime, particularly murder, isn’t only in the news but on stage, on television, in the movies, in books and now, incredibly, at the opera.
In November, Rattenbury: A New Canadian Opera was staged before sell-out audiences at Pacific Opera Victoria’s Bauman Centre.
The subject of this musical melodrama was Francis Rattenbury whose contributions to B.C. architecture include the Parliament buildings, but who’s best remembered for having been brutally murdered by his wife’s young lover.
As local composer Tobin Stokes marvelled to a Times Colonist reporter, “He had done these incredible institutions and then his life ends being killed in a small house in another country.”
The result of several years’ effort, Rattenbury the Opera is intended to create wider than local interest. Certainly the real story is fascinating enough and already is quite well known, thanks to Rattenbury’s architectural legacy and the book on his life by the late Victoria author Terry Reksten.
His was a meteoric career; chosen to design the Legislature buildings while still in his 20s, he went on to design one landmark after another in Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver. But his career began to crumble when, in middle age and by then an alcoholic, he cast off his wife to marry the younger Alma Pakenham, a widow and divorcee with a reputation for being addicted to morphine and sex.
With his architectural practice ruined by scandal, the Rattenburys retired to a modest cottage life in England, he to drink his troubles away, she to take on a young lover, their teen-aged and dull-witted chauffeur.
The tragedy entered high gear when the chauffeur crushed Rattenbury’s skull with a mallet. He and Alma were charged with murder; she was acquitted, he was sentenced to hang then commuted. Within days of her acquittal, Alma served sentence on herself by committing suicide.
Almost a century later, some believe that Rattenbury’s ghost haunts the Legislature and the Empress Hotel which he also designed.
All of which explains composer Stokes’s two literary themes, Rattenbury’s “unbalanced ambition” and Alma’s addiction. (And which also explains the opera’s appeal to audiences, I’m sure.)
An interesting sidelight is that this isn’t opera in the classical sense of a large theatre, large cast and large orchestra, but is “intimate chamber opera,” so scaled down and intimate that the audience is “sitting in the lap of the players”. Something that would appeal to Alma, no doubt!
On the literary scene, a new book has been published about the unsolved death of 22-year-old nursemaid Janet Smith in Vancouver in 1924. She has the dubious distinction of being considered by some historians as being B.C.’s “most notorious cold case”. “The Depths of Shaughnessy Heights,” the headline for a review of The White Angel by John MacLauchlan Gray in B.C. Bookworld, alludes to the sad fact that the police investigation was atrociously bungled, and that petty politics and overt racism (a Chinese houseboy was railroaded as the chief suspect) make the Janet Smith case a study in human nastiness. No wonder the real circumstances surrounding her death remain “cold.”
The most saddening aspect of the Janet Smith case is that it was allowed to degenerate into a tragi-comedy to the extent that, when viewed from the vantage point of 90 years later, it’s an affront not just to logic but to our sense of justice and decency. Every base human flaw played their role in this epic crime drama. It’s a wonder that no one has made a movie of this mystery which could well have been, as was originally suspected, not murder at all but suicide.
What must be a literary first is news that recently retired Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlan has written a book — not a memoir of her career as a lawyer and jurist but a pot boiler; or “legal thriller,” as it’s described in a news report. Full Disclosure, her first novel which surely draws upon her legal experiences, is due for release in May.
To again quote from The Canadian Press, her book is about a defence lawyer “who tries to unravel a web of secrets around the murder of a wealthy man’s wife”.
There have been some successful lawyer-authors before her but, surely, this is the first case of a former chief justice taking up a pen to create popular fiction?
As I stated earlier, crime is high entertainment these days. As, in reality, it has always been — for all that tells us about our fascination with murder most foul.