'The Temptress,' by Paul Spicer

The Temptress

The Scandalous Life of Alice de Janzé and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll

By Paul Spicer

(St. Martin's; 262 pages; $25.99)

Unsolved killings of high-profile victims tend to have an enduring fascination, but few have attracted the level of attention given to one that took place amid Kenya's fabled Happy Valley settlers in the midst of World War II.

For Josslyn Victor Hay was not only the 22nd Earl of Erroll and Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, but a good-looking, dashing, polo-playing Lothario, much married and a serial adulterer - particularly with his friends' wives. Even in a set notorious for its louche ways - "Are you married or do you live in Kenya?" was a favorite opening gambit in London society - Joss, as he was universally known, was quite a player.

So it was not surprising when, not long after he was found shot to death in his car on a dark road, the much-older husband of his latest beautiful young mistress, Diana Delves Broughton, was charged with murder. But when Sir Henry John "Jock" Delves Broughton - you can't help feeling that the names of those involved helped give legs to this story - was acquitted after a sensational trial, it was impossible to know for certain whodunit. And so began decades of speculation, invigorated by James Fox's sensational 1982 "White Mischief" and the 1988 movie based on it.

The eponymous "Temptress" of the latest contribution to this mini-genre has been until now a peripheral figure - she was played by Sarah Miles in the film of "White Mischief" - and mostly figured as an illustration of the Happy Valley's scandalous life. But, based on information available only to him - his parents lived in Kenya between the wars, and his mother knew Alice de Janzé - her biographer believes that she was the one who killed Lord Erroll.

Paul Spicer not only lived in Kenya and visited many of the actual locales but conducted research that was exhaustive - and more importantly, targeted in light of his unique store of knowledge. He certainly presents a plausible case, based not only on circumstantial evidence - Alice killed herself not long after the acquittal of Delves Broughton and left a suicide note that has been suppressed - but also on a credible psychological analysis of Alice's character and her history with lovers who had dumped her.

Alice was most notorious not for her Kenyan high jinks but for shooting through the chest English aristocrat Raymund de Trafford in a Paris train station. This highly publicized incident took place as he was returning home after telling her that they were through. Amazingly enough, she got away with this attempted murder, receiving a mere slap on the wrist - time already served while awaiting trial - because of the prevailing tolerance under French law for crimes of passion.

More remarkable still, she married de Trafford shortly afterward, engendering worldwide headlines along the lines of the New York Times' "American Woman Weds Man She Shot" or the London Evening Standard's ironic "Romance of Happy Valley," and returned to Kenya with him. Less surprisingly, the marriage didn't last, perhaps because, as Evelyn Waugh wrote after visiting the colony, Raymund was "very nice but SO BAD. He fights and [fornicates] and gambles and gets DD [disgustingly drunk] all the time."

But Spicer brings much more to his claim than the de Trafford shooting. He constructs a convincing psychological profile of a poor little rich girl - her mother was a fabulously wealthy heiress to the Armour meatpacking fortune who died when Alice was 6, as a result of her husband's mistreatment of her. Not surprisingly, the motherless child was both overly attached to and disappointed by her surviving parent, who, after a spell of guiltily lavishing her with attention, betrayed her by marrying again.

And so a lifelong pattern was established. Alice's first husband, a French count, proved to be a disappointing lover but gave her two daughters (whom she basically abandoned) and an aristocratic French name and title. But he didn't engage her passion - and so was exempt from her murderous rage.

Spicer may well have solved the mystery of Lord Erroll's killing because of his private store of information and his assiduous following up of where it led, but this first-time author has written a less-than-compelling book. Although his judgment of Alice's psyche and temperament is acute, he lacks the writing skills to bring her - or for that matter, her various milieus - to life, making his account of her life duller than you might think its sensational aspects would permit.

But most of all, "The Temptress" lacks the flair that accounts for the success of last year's "The Bolter" (about Joss' former wife, Lady Idina Sackville) and most of the other contributions to the literature of the Happy Valley. They're all such fun to read. This one, despite its forensic successes, just isn't.