Zadie Smith · Alfred Hitchcock

The crime
The Tichborne case, in which a man who went by various names put himself forward for the inheritance of the Tichborne baronetcy — then, (allegedly) unmasked, got convicted of perjury and sent to prison.

The story
Zadie Smith is not a true-crime writer; but her latest novel draws extensively from court records of one of the most sensational trials of Victorian England. The Fraud uses the facts of a truly bizarre series of legal proceedings to interrogate issues of class and race in the UK, and makes some not terribly subtle connections to today.

Throughout the book, we follow our main character, Eliza Touchet, from her youth in literary circles, including notables like Charles Dickens, to her life as a widow living with her cousin (a real-life, though now forgotten, writer who once outsold Dickens), and her growing fascination with a sensational true-crime case later in her life. The parts of the book that come from Touchet’s perspective, especially her musings on the role of women and class, are very much inspired by Virginia Woolf. Touchet would like to be a novelist, but, as Woolf said, a woman needs 500 pounds a year to be a writer, and since Touchet has only 100 pounds a year, she never publishes.