Hallie Rubenhold: Books Are Like Babies

Hallie Rubenhold is a bestselling author and Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize-winning social historian whose expertise lies in revealing stories of previously unknown women and episodes in history. As well as The Covent Garden Ladies, Rubenhold's works of nonfiction include the award-winning and national bestselling The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and Lady Worsley's Whim, dramatized by the BBC as "The Scandalous Lady W." She has also written two acclaimed novels, Mistress of My Fate and The French Lesson, which are feminist homages to the literary tropes of the 18th century. She lives in London with her husband. Follow her on Bluesky, X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Hallie discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic completely upended her writing plans for her new historical true crime book, Story of a Murder, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Hallie Rubenhold
Literary agent: Eleanor Jackson (U.S.), Sarah Ballard (U.K.)
Book title: Story of a Murder
Publisher: Dutton (PRH)
Release date: March 26, 2025
Genre/category: History / True Crime
Previous titles: Nonfiction: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper; Lady Worlsey’s Whim (published as The Lady in Red in the U.S.), The Covent Garden Ladies; fiction: Mistress of My Fate; The French Lesson
Elevator pitch: Story of a Murder is one of the most sensational and infamous American true crime stories you’ve never heard of!

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After writing The Five I became aware of how historic true crime stories were being told, and how these tales had been entirely owned as crime “legend.” The result of this is that the original narratives formulated in the periods in which the murders occurred were never questioned, but rather repeated for their sensational value. Many historians have traditionally written off true crime as “junk history”—unsavory cultural legends, hyped and doctored by the press in order to sell papers, but this is simply untrue. A historical true crime provides a detailed snapshot of an era and allows us to dig deep and understand our past through this very focused and dramatic event. The danger of leaving these stories to the realm of legend is that they are simply repeated as they appeared in the writing and journalism of the time. They are presented with the prejudices of the era fully intact. Stories like these are simply recirculated in podcasts, in TV and film, online and in books, and they shouldn’t be. They should be probed and questioned like any other event in history. I thought it was high time that someone apply this approach to the murder of Belle Elmore.

The biggest obstacle to writing this book was the pandemic. I had written the proposal and had it accepted just before we went into lockdown. Of course, I never saw this coming, nor did I anticipate having to wait a full two years to be able to complete all of my research due to archive and library closures in the U.K., Ireland, and in the U.S. I was also tied up with a successful podcast, Bad Women (Pushkin) and when the archives began to open up again, I could only work on Story of a Murder in stages. It was quite frustrating at times.

Other than the fact that the entire rule book was thrown out the window during the pandemic—no! We all had to make up strategies as we went along. I hope it’s not something we have to face again. A lot of nonfiction authors found the situation particularly stressful. We rely on access to libraries and archives, and without these resources, it’s impossible to write true stories as fluently or as fully as we would like. Never take libraries for granted!

Having to rethink how I was going to write and research this book, almost from the outset. I had a research plan—I was going to come to New York in April 2020, in fact I had my ticket booked. I was going to spend three weeks in the U.S. going to various archives. Instead, I had to start writing this book without having done any of the primary research. The result was when I was able to get into the archives, I then had to rewrite everything! It was too difficult to sit on my hands and do nothing—I had to start somewhere.

I really hope that American readers will be introduced to this incredible story, which is truly a Transatlantic tale of a world which was becoming increasingly smaller and more modern at the turn of the last century. Belle’s murder occurred two years before the Titanic set sail and it’s very much of its era—a time of tremendous cultural and technological change and upheaval, especially for women who were really finding their voices. I’m also hoping readers will come to understand true crime in a different light—these stories are not gory legends, these events happened to real people and their families, and this needs to be recognized with compassion. The murder of Belle Elmore sent shockwaves around the world. It was literally front-page news for months in 1910.

Whatever nonfiction project you take on, make sure you love it, that the subject fascinates you deeply, because it will become your entire life, not only for the time you are researching and writing it, but for years afterwards. Books are like babies, they are brought into the world with a lot of labor and (sometimes) pain, but they become a part of who you are, even after you have set them free into the world.