Mr Atherstone Leaves the Stage The Battersea Murder Mystery

This is the first book to tell the story of the Sherlockian mystery that is the classic London Battersea Flat Murder. On a beautiful July evening in 1910, Thomas Weldon Atherstone, at forty-seven a handsome and popular actor, was found dying on the ground at the foot of an iron staircase running down the back of a mansion block hard by Battersea Park, in south London. He had been shot. Some 104 years later, who shot him and why he was killed remains a total mystery. This book, the product of deep and wide-ranging pioneer research, provides a complete revelation of the actor's life story; his birth in the outskirts of Liverpool; the twenty-six-year cavalcade of his theatrical career; his marriage and its breakup; and his mistress, Elizabeth Earle, about whom the tragedy undoubtedly centres. Earlier on the July evening of his death, Atherstone had gone to the Battersea mansions, where Elizabeth Earle occupied a flat on the first floor. The tenant of the top-floor flat was away. The ground-floor flat was vacant, and Atherstone had managed to get into it. There, lurking in the darkness, wearing carpet slippers, his outdoor boots wrapped up in a brown paper-and-string parcel and stowed away on the mantelpiece, he was crouched, waiting and watching. What for? In all probability for the stealthy advent of his imagined rival, the jealousy-constructed, phantasmic, secret lover of Elizabeth Earle. But just what happened next, and how did it come about? Richard Whittington-Egan tells the tale, and explains the theories.