Emma Flint’s 2016 debut, Little Deaths, was a fictionalisation of the trial of Alice Crimmins, an American waitress whose children went missing from her apartment in Queens, New York, in 1965 and were later found dead. Other Women (Picador) takes another tale of a true crime and reimagines it into a novel – this time, the murder of Emily Beilby Kaye by her married lover, Herbert Patrick Mahon, in south-east England in April 1924. In Flint’s moving, gripping retelling, Kaye becomes Beatrice Cade, a 37-year-old typist working in London after the first world war, holding tight to her small scrap of life and independence. When salesman Thomas Ryan directs his attention at her, she falls hard for him.
Flint’s telling moves between Bea’s growing feelings for Ryan and the discoveries of Ryan’s wife, Kate, after Bea’s murder, as the story twists its way towards Ryan’s trial. The case “was huge in England at the time: it was a milestone in the development of forensic science”, Flint tells us in an afterword. “No crime has ever moved the nation like the death of Miss Beatrice Cade on the lonely stretch of shore near Eastbourne,” blares her fictional newspaper. Flint brings the trial to nail-biting, horrifying life: will Ryan, handsome and accomplished, get away with killing a woman who everyone agrees was nothing special – “so ordinary. She was the kind of woman you fail to notice on the omnibus every single day”? Other Women is also memorable for how Flint highlights the desperate situation so many women were in after the first world war – single or widowed, searching for work they couldn’t find, a destitute future ahead of them. “Misses without youth, middle-aged without wedding rings… Bea was one of these other women.”
