The Vitamin Murders: Who Killed Healthy Eating in Britain?
by James Fergusson
Portobello £12.99, pp264
You can't help liking the author of this first-person attempt to dig up - figuratively - the English bodies in a notorious 55-year-old French murder case and to find out whodunit. His heart is in the right organic place. But you can't forgive James Fergusson or his publishers for muddling up the attempted solution of the triple murder of Jack Drummond (1891-1952), his wife Anne and their 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, with musings about how Fergusson and his wife become paranoid about their own food.
Inside this bloated book, there struggles to wriggle out a substantial pamphlet about the murder of Britain's best-known nutritionist and apostle of wholemeal bread, who, early in the Second World War, became adviser to the Ministry of Food and collaborated closely with Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food. Despite shortages and rationing (still in force when Drummond was killed), they gave Britain a diet that was actually healthier than before the war and had an influence that continues - and is even becoming fashionable - today.
Drummond was a star. He became professor of biochemistry at University College London aged only 31, following his research into butter and margarine, during which he worked on vitamins. A bon vivant, he was well travelled in the better-fed parts of Europe.
But was Drummond the full shilling? The mystery begins after the war, when this public-service-oriented scientist did not return to academia, but joined the private sector as research director of Boots, then not the cuddly retail chain we now know, but involved in agrochemical research into weedkillers, for example, of the sort whose unwelcome molecular progeny medical analysis found present in the bodies of Fergusson and his wife.
In August 1952, Drummond, Anne and Elizabeth set out in their Hillman on a camping trip in France. They were on their way back to a house they were sharing in Provence, when they stopped for the night near a farmhouse on a main road. A 76-year-old peasant farmer, Gaston Dominici, finally confessed to shooting the adults and brutally beating the child to death and was jailed; he later retracted his statement and President de Gaulle ordered his release on humanitarian grounds in 1959. In the meantime, there had been hundreds of books, thousands of articles and a spate of TV programmes on L'Affaire Dominici, reflecting the large number of conspiracy theories that developed. Most involved industrial espionage and Fergusson thinks Drummond was caught up in (but not killed because of) his work for the British agrochemical industry.
Exciting stuff, but this is polemic posing as thriller. Fergusson learnt about the murders as a result of an accidental encounter in the cemetery where the Drummonds are buried, so you can understand why he tells his tale in the first person. The material, however, turns out to be elusive.
The execrable writing of the first chapter (no metaphor left unmixed, no cliche unperpetrated) improves as the narrative gets closer to the murders, but most of this maddeningly index-lacking (and unannotated) book consists of interesting but reader-frustrating digressions - and you feel in the end that the title is a cheat.
