The Fraud

Starred review from July 10, 2023
Smith’s mesmerizing latest (after the essay collection Feel Free) centers on a real-life Victorian cause célèbre involving a man who claims to be a long-lost English aristocrat. The story opens in 1873, when Scottish widow Eliza Touchet (like most of the novel’s characters, a historical figure) has spent four decades as the housekeeper for novelist William Ainsworth, her cousin by marriage. One of her distractions from her unrewarding life is the highly publicized controversy surrounding the so-called Tichborne Claimant. English aristocrat Roger Tichborne is believed to have drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1854. Twelve years later, however, a man who says he’s Sir Roger begins a lengthy attempt to claim the Tichborne title and fortune. As a spectator at the 1871 civil trial the claimant initiates to establish his identity, Eliza doubts his story yet instinctively believes one of the witnesses on his behalf, a formerly enslaved man named Andrew Bogle. After the jury rules against the claimant and he is arrested for perjury and fraud, Eliza introduces herself to Bogle. An abolitionist, she’s moved by his dignity and vulnerability, and persuades him to tell her his story. In the process, she realizes that she, like Ainsworth, is a writer. Smith weaves Eliza’s shrewd and entertaining recollections of her life, a somber account of Bogle’s ancestry and past, brief excerpts from Ainsworth’s books, and historic trial transcripts into a seamless and stimulating mix, made all the more lively by her juxtaposing of imagination with first- and secondhand accounts and facts. The result is a triumph of historical fiction.

Starred review from December 1, 2023

Through decades of decline, Eliza Touchet has kept house for William Harrison Ainsworth and continued to edit his egregious prose. She remembers the 1830s, when a backbiting cohort of British literati celebrated Ainsworth almost as much as up-and-comer Dickens. Thirty years later, a new national fixation on the controversial Tichborne Trial intrudes on Eliza's orderly management of yet another move by her boss to less expensive quarters. The prickly Scotswoman scorns news of the trial until she has the chance to interview a witness for the defense--a supporter of the Australian butcher claiming to be heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed dead. Andrew Bogle, even more than Eliza, has been staunch. He says so in one of the many brilliant character voices that Smith herself performs in this audio adaptation of her latest novel. Performing Scottish Eliza, Jamaican Andrew, and Britons from all social classes, Smith imbues her writing with added authenticity for listeners. She even sings a few bars (applying her jazz background to her sixth novel as deftly as she incorporated a love of dance in Swing Time, her fifth), demonstrating that genuine self-expression pays off, though not for poor Ainsworth. VERDICT A must-buy audio. Smith's intricately constructed pastiche of 19th-century British literature, an indictment of cultural hypocrisy, is superb.--Lauren Kage

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