I do remember the trial of Dr. Bodkin Adams. My family took The Daily Herald back in 1957 and I was old enough to pay attention. I recall being fascinated by the name Bodkin and who could not be interested in the sensational trial of a doctor accused of drugging and murdering his patient in order to profit from a legacy? 

The trial lasted a then-unprecedented seventeen days and made headlines around the world. Over fifty stories in the Herald that year. Eighty crime reporters, foreign correspondents, and writers were in attendance. It was hard to miss.

Sybille Bedford attended every day of the trial at the Old Bailey and her closely observed account – The Best We Can Do – provides a gripping counterpoint to the lurid press coverage. You can read it here. 

I did not remember the verdict and restrained my natural inclination to go look it up before delving into the book. 

And that was a gift because Bedford’s book is as good as any page-turner crime story or thriller I have ever read.  Better in fact, for the plot is undiluted courtroom drama.

She sets the scene:

Outside in the street, the Old Bailey is sustaining a siege this morning. Police vans and press vans, cameras and cameramen, detective sergeants and C.I.D.s and hangers-on, comings and goings in closed limousines, young men in bowler hats bent double under the weight of papers nudging their way through the crowd, a line of special constables at every door, and thirty extra quarts of milk left for the cafeteria. Here, inside the court, there is more than silence, there is quiet.

And the Central Criminal Court Number One at the Old Bailey:

Court No. I at the Old Bailey is a large court as English courts go. It is all the same no more than a large room, and it is packed today. As an auditorium it boasts some drawbacks. For one thing it is cramful of woodwork. Stained oak obstructs foot and eye. Boxes, desks, tables, benches, fitted ingeniously enough, jut at all angles ; they hold about two hundred people, and some of them can hear nearly everything and see one thing very well. The witness-box, at conversational distance from the dais, stands in something like the relation of the lectern to the altar; other items bear the stamp of the committee-room, while the benches of the press-box might have come from a Victorian school. The shorthand writer has his own small pen. The dock is something else again. It is like a capacious loose-box, the only space in court that is not jammed, and it is set up plumb in the middle of everything, blocking every view. Yet the sum of these arrangements achieves a satisfying sense of unity. The prisoner can look across the well at the Judge; the Judge sees him. Between them, below, in the small square pit, furrowed by advocates’ benches, munitioned from the solicitors’ table, the fray takes place.

Each chapter of the book takes us through a day of the trial. This is how Day One begins:

The Judge came on swiftly. Out of the side door, an ermined puppet progressing weightless along the bench, head held at an angle, an arm swinging, the other crooked under cloth and gloves, trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age: an Elizabethan shadow gliding across the arras.

For all the grand sweep of her story, it is the closely observed and chosen detail that makes the story so compelling.

Bedford compresses those seventeen days of testimony and courtroom drama into a short book that never seems to cheat the reader of essential detail and emotional impact.

There are the courtroom theatrics – expert witnesses who contradict each other, witnesses shown to be lying, and the surprise of new evidence.

As the trial proceeds, the reader – like the jury and the courtroom observers – is taken on an emotional big dipper ride of shifting perception as the arguments and evidence tumble forward. 

Suddenly the case is underway. Nurse Stronach – stocky, a face of blurred features except for a narrow mouth and strong jaw. By question fitted after question, counsel gets her to put the court in the picture; we have returned to the tortoise from the spectator’s hare.

“The court is ready for the next attempt to push the pendulum”

“Then comes the short adjournment. Some of the special correspondents, unhardened yet to the see-saw of a case, are staggered and subdued; there is a sheepish feeling of having been caught footling.”

Another field day for the tortoise. At the end of it there is one moment when it looks as if Mr Lawrence had put the prosecution case into a sieve. We start off with a sense of staleness: it’s been going on too long ; there are no hard facts ; the old points have been churned into impenetrable mud. . . . Then Dr Ashby turns out to be a giving witness.

Bedford sticks to the story and only rarely provides commentary. There are occasional interludes – adjournments – where she offers overheard snatches of speculation that function as a kind of dramatic chorus on the spinning wheel of fortune and technical complexity of the expert testimony.   

‘You believe Dr. Harman is right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You believe Dr. Douthwaite was?’
‘I don’t think so
‘Do you believe Dr. Ashby?’
‘Yes but I don’t know what he said.’
‘Then what do you believe?’
‘Dr.Ashby.’
But what did he say?
I don’t know.

Along the way, we learn a great deal about narcotics and the acceptable dosages of morphine and heroin for various conditions. (This trial was to lead to significant changes in medical as well as legal practice.) 

There are rare moments when Bedford allows herself some observation on the law and puzzling social contradictions:

The law, these human agents of the law, are very careful. The scales at a capital trial are weighted in favour of the accused, and at the same time there is the literal respect for life itself: the law does not say, this woman was old, this woman was dying, the law does not ask what a life was worth. Ungrudged day after day is spent dispassionately thrashing out whether there has been an intent to kill in one man’s mind, whether one woman’s span was cut some weeks before its time. In our day, when there co-exist the hideous evils of arbitrary arrest, torture, and set-piece trials…. – Admirable, indeed.

But does it not strike us that our sense is intermittent and our conscience split? Can we not imagine that if our descendants were asked a hundred and fifty years from now what struck them as most shocking and discrepant in our present time, they might point — provided they’ll be there to tell the tale — to the hair-splitting niceties of this trial combined with the acceptance of the H-bomb as an example of our staggering schizophrenia.

But for the most part, her focus is the taut telling of a courtroom drama with all its theatrics conveyed with effective economy and stylistic compression. She makes great use of parenthesis to describe the performance of the prime players conveying nuance of attitude, tone, and style with shorthand precision. The police witness is a tenor aria; other performances are described as second violin, adagio, rallentando, smooth as silk, shaved ice.

Bedford writes so well and the pace is relentless. The story is tight and grips like a hangman’s noose that may indeed be tightening around the neck of the accused  (This was before the 1965 suspension and later abolition of the death penalty.)

The accused Doctor sits in the dock, ‘warder on each side, like a contained explosive.’

Mr. Lawrence has a second rabbit in his top hat.

This is not quite enough to make the evening-paper men bolt for the telephone, but it makes everyone sit up.

Carefree rather than olympian or dogmatic, the witness has his own brand of certainty.

Something that could be taken for a faint superior smile crosses Dr. Douthwaite’s face.
Mr. Lawrence: ‘I do not see anything amusing in that. Dr. Douthwaite. I hope you don’t.’
‘No, I quite agree. I was just thinking of your terms of prognosis.’
Mr. Lawrence [deruffled; so many passages are like the uproarious and abortive onset of a dogfight]

The doctor, beet red in the face, rocks to and fro. 

Thick silence. Dr Douthwaite [in a quiet voice]: ‘The only conclusion I can come to is that the intention on November 8th was to terminate her life.’

The Doctor alone is still swinging his head in mournful negation.

In the words of the accused Dr.John Bodkin Adams:  “Murder? Can you prove it?”

Sybille Bedford had her opinion. What is yours, based on the trial and not all the rest?