Happy Valley

By Patricia Blake

WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox Random House; 299 pages; $15.95

Hemingway made it his happiest hunting ground. Isak Dinesen, in Out of Africa, compared it to England in the 18th century, when an aristocrat might possess a "lovely landscape and a multitude of servants." For Cyril Connolly, however, the East African colony of Kenya was no paradise lost. It was the site of a 1941 murder that obsessed the British essayist and critic for a decade. By the time Connolly died in 1974, he had come tantalizingly close to finding the answer to the question that had mesmerized two generations of colonial society: Who shot Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland?

Connolly's original partner in detection and the heir to his notebooks was James Fox, a British journalist who went on to reconstruct the crime and, after trips to Kenya and interviews with Lord Erroll's friends, produce a plausible murderer. His gift for narrative immediately carries the reader into a long-gone, closed world of privilege and debauchery. White Mischiefs authentic cast of characters is as satisfyingly repellent a crew as ever peopled Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novel of English predators on the loose in Africa.

Feckless, flashy Lord Erroll was a leader of the British gentry that had settled in Happy Valley near Nairobi in the 1920s and 1930s seeking the openly hedonistic existence that was denied them at home. Unobserved except by the black servants whom they regarded as subhuman, the nobs did as they pleased. Lord Erroll's specialty was seducing married women. "To hell with husbands," was a favorite saying. "And to cuckold a man carelessly, while slapping him on the back or borrowing a fiver, added to his pleasure," Fox notes. Lord Erroll's first wife, Lady Idina, Countess of Erroll, was less selective. Her bed was known as "the battleground." Recalled one of her many house guests: "We all used to end up in it at various times of the day and night." Cocaine in Kenya was sniffed like snuff; champagne was the water of life.

When Lord Erroll was found shot through the head at the age of 39, in 1941, police arrested one of the cuckolded husbands, Sir John Henry ("Jock") Delves Broughton, 57. The motive seemed compelling. Broughton's bride of three months, Diana, 27, had fallen in love with Lord Erroll and wanted a divorce. Always the gentleman, Jock acquiesced; he even went so far as to bless the union of his erstwhile best friend and his bride. But as Lord Erroll remarked on the eve of his murder, "He has been so nice it smells bad."

At the time, the Kenyan aristocrats closed ranks to protect one of their own, though most suspected Broughton of the crime. A friend gave him an alibi. Diana hired a brilliant defense lawyer from South Africa. After Broughton was acquitted of the murder, he received a cable from the Earl of Carnarvon and Montgomery (HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS ON WINNING A NECK CLEVERLY), and was invited to recuperate from the trial at the palace of the Maharajah of Jhopur. Still, the smell persisted. Thirty years after the crime, Fox persuaded three people to talk about the murder confessions Broughton had made to them before he took a fatal dose of morphine in 1942, 17 months after his acquittal.

The most revealing anecdote in this enthralling tale comes from Diana, now Lady Delamere. When Fox caught up with the 68-year-old millionaire in 1981, he was impressed by her still handsome figure, her "ice-blue eyes," and her sapphires and diamonds. She told Fox about another crime, perhaps a worse one in the eyes of the denizens of Happy Valley. After the murder, Broughton had gone to Lord Erroll's estate and killed one of his dogs, a dachshund. As Lady Delamere saw it, there could no longer be any doubt that Broughton was "the most evil man." --By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.