See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, Australia, 2017

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
 
See What I Have Done is yet another story about the gruesome murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Massachusetts in 1892. Andrew’s daughter Lizzie was charged and gaoled but was eventually acquitted, and with there being insufficient evidence to charge anyone else the question as to who was the murderer remains open.
 
Although the finger was pointed at Lizzie, there were a number of other people who could have easily killed the Bordens: Lizzie’s older sister Emma; the maid, Bridget; Lizzie and Emma’s maternal uncle, John. . .  In her book, Sarah Schmidt skilfully lays all these possibilities on the table as well as introducing a fictional character Benjamin. Nothing is definite, everything is implied, and it is up to the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.
 
The Bordens were a well-off family, and Abby was Andrew’s second wife, his first wife, the mother of Emma and Lizzie, having died when Lizzie was only three. Schmidt’s picture of the family is not a particularly happy one, with the two girls referring to their step-mother as Mrs Borden and a fortune hunter while resenting both the iron grip and the miserliness of their father.
 
It is thanks to Schmidt’s skill that she is able to retain suspense in such a well documented and well known story right to the last page. The reader is given so many possibilities to consider and, like a poker player, Schmidt keeps her cards hidden. There is a lot of ‘negative’ description in the book: mildew, vomit, sweat, blood, the disgusting mutton broth that Bridget marches out for every meal. . .  images and smells which in turn colour the background against which the murders finally take place. Both uncle John and Benjamin are painted as unsavoury, almost repulsive, characters, and even Lizzie herself is not particularly pleasant.
 
The reader is pushed and pulled between the many different possibilities: did Lizzie kill her father in revenge for him having killed her pigeons? Did the stranger, Benjamin, do it in expectation of money promised him by John? Did Bridget kill Abby when the older woman confiscated her life savings? Did Emma finally decide to even the score with her father after he had literally ruined her life?
 
In the end, it really does not matter which of these scenarios might be correct; the important thing is that Schmidt has managed to give a feasible and thrilling perspective to something that happened more than one hundred years ago.

Photo of Sarah Schmidt from Curtis Brown