The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll

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This is the fascinating life of femme fatale Alice de Janzé, a book that “may well have solved the mystery of Lord Erroll’s killing” (San Francisco Chronicle)—the story at the center of James Fox’s White Mischief. A glamorous American multimillionairess, Alice de Janzé scandalized 1920s Paris when she left her aristocratic French husband for an English lover—whom she later tried to kill in a failed murder-suicide. Abandoning Paris for the moneyed British colonial society known as Kenya’s Happy Valley, she became the lover of womanizer Joss Hay, Lord Erroll. In 1941, Erroll was shot in his car on an isolated road. The crime remained unsolved.Paul Spicer, whose mother was a confidante of Alice’s, uses personal letters and research to piece together what really happened that fateful evening. He brings to life an era of unimaginable wealth and indulgence, where jealousy and hidden passions brewed. At the heart of The Temptress is Alice, whose seductive charms no man could resist, and whose unfulfilled quest for love ended in her own suicide at age forty-two.From Publishers WeeklyPlease note: the ebook edition does not include photos that originally appeared in the printed book.The 1941 fatal shooting of British earl Joss Erroll in Kenya made headlines worldwide (and was the subject of the book and movie White Mischief). A cuckolded husband was acquitted, and now Kenyan-born former oil executive Spicer intriguingly fingers his late mother™s friend, Countess Alice de Janzé, Joss™s discarded mistress. Alice™s complicated and violent love life was possibly attributable to bipolar disorder and to abandonment by her father, a self-made American millionaire, when Alice was 13. Alice married a French count, Frédéric de Janzé, and to escape the stuffy confines of French society, the couple spent much of their time in Kenya. There Alice had two love affairs that, according to Spicer, goaded Alice to violence: she made a botched murder-suicide attempt in 1927 when English aristocrat Raymund de Trafford rejected her, yet they married in 1932 (Alice had already left her husband). Alice had also begun a two-decade-long liaison with Joss. Though Joss had many enemies, Spicer posits that Alice killed Joss, and months later, at age 42, committed suicide, hoping they would be reunited in the afterlife. The author™s depiction of the unstable heiress and her milieu of wealthy expatriates cavorting in the Kenyan highlands is engrossing. 8 pages of b&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistKenya's notorious “Happy Valley” set flourished during the twenties and thirties, providing enough scandalous fodder to fuel numerous books and movies. The Kenyan-born Spicer takes a leaf from Frances Osborne's The Bolter: Idina Sackville—the Woman Who Scandalized 1920s Society and Became White Mischief's Infamous Seductress (2009) by chronicling the checkered life of Alice de Janzé, another fascinating, if twisted, resident of Happy Valley. Focusing on the unsolved murder of the wickedly handsome Joss Hay, Lord Erroll in 1941, he alleges that Alice, a fading American glamour girl with a penchant for titled aristos, actually shot Erroll in a fit of insanely jealous pique. Basing his theory on the thinnest of evidence—gossip, hearsay, and a letter of confession from Alice that he has never actually seen—he nevertheless paints an intriguing portrait of a thoroughly debauched social circle. Recommend this speculative true-crime scenario to readers prepared to reconcile simultaneous feelings of intrigue and antipathy. --Margaret Flanagan