Lucky' Lady

Nancy Holmes, a joumalist and the author of a new novel, Nobody's Fault (Bantam), spent the early seventies in London. Formerly married to a yeast heir and keen gambler (Chris Holmes), she knew her way around the gaming world. When she was once lunching in the modish Clermont Club, her eye was caught by the nobleman gamester "Lucky" Lord Lucan, but she thought little of it until a few weeks later when his face was splashed over every front page in the country. She followed the tale: how Lucan, trying to murder his wife, accidentally did in the nanny; how he fled; how his friends stood by him; how one of them, the witty painter Dominick Elwes, killed himself after being brutally snubbed as a supposed source of information and "private" photographs of the group for London's Sunday Times; how, whenever a tabloid's circulation flagged, a "Lucan spotting" was apt to occur in some unlikely locale.

Holmes duly returned to the U.S., left journalism, and turned to fiction. Her first effort failed to ignite, but in 1986 her attention flicked back to the Clermont Club. The male protagonist of her new novel, Lord Warrington, nicknamed "Winner," is a loser who tries to kill his wife, accidentally offs the nanny, and takes it on the lam. He is protected by his friends, but one of them, a witty artist, kills himself after they accuse him of being indiscreet. Such parallels apart, her book is only "very loosely based" on the Lucan affair.

Actually, she has a point. Lucan's friends took his part because they thought his wife unlikable and unstable—dubious grounds for condoning murder, perhaps, and it also made for a yam with few reader-friendly characters. Lady Lucan was institutionalized after her husband vanished, and later checked herself out, whereas Amanda Warrington, who is bright, beautiful, and misunderstood, makes a brilliant second marriage. It may not be reality, but which version is most likely to end up on the reading table in the guest bedroom?

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST