A standard description of the events of and around Dr Crippen’s activities constituted “one of the most infamous murders of the twentieth century”.

His known crime was appalling (and there is a reasonable suggestion of another) but there has been a tendency for many writers to produce in effect another recycled story.

Newer versions are necessary because of what appears to be a greater knowledge amongst the public of criminal law, policing, and the nature of criminals and crime.

Perhaps the real point about new publications on famous crimes is to ask what, if anything, the latest narrative adds to the total of the general understanding of events.

The essential point about the work of Helen Rubenhold is the extent to which the former has written a social history of the lives of the central participants, not least the deceased lady.

Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was not medically qualified: his homeopathic qualification had been obtained in America.

Moreover, while impressionable personally, Crippen could never retain any employment for long, and latterly survived on the sale of patent medicine with exploitative claims. Cherchez la femme: Crippen’s typist in the same firm, Ethel Le Neve, was also his lover, and not merely “an innocent young girl” in thrall to a powerful older man.

On 1 February, 1910, a music hall performer, Belle Elmore, vanished from her London home, causing alarm among members of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild who contacted the police.

Belle Elmore was the stage name of Crippen’s wife and a search of the matrimonial home led to the discovery of human remains and thereafter a widespread hunt for him. The case against Crippen seems to have been the complete disappearance of his wife with his associated lies and apparently his lack of any attempt to try to find her.

Partial remains found hidden in the basement could be shown not to have been there before Crippen moved into the house. These remains contained a distinctive chemical, a poison that Crippen himself was shown to have purchased in extraordinary bulk before the discovery.

The remains included a fragment of human skin from a part of the body that was said (and this was contested) to be from the area of the body where Belle Elmore, Mrs Crippen, was known to have had a scar from a medical operation.

Remnants of a pyjama jacket were found with the human remains, and elsewhere in the house was a set of pyjamas known to be Crippens that were missing the jacket. Other evidence included Crippen being seen in his garden burning an excessive amount of unknown material or substances.

His replacement of his wife with his lover at the house was notably swift with little or nothing of the usual customary display of mourning. Crippen’s flight from England when the police were looking for him led after a dramatic pursuit to his arrest with his lover, when he gallantly but ambiguously said “she knows nothing about it”.

Modern scientific research has doubted much of the medical inferences made as to the human remains at the trial. Contrary scientific opinion has doubted the veracity of the manner in which the modern research was conducted.

All that and more is narrated in compelling detail in what will be a book on the case that will not be improved, it may be thought, for a long time.

Story of a Murder, The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr Crippen’s Crime of the Century by Hallie Rubenhold. Published by Doubleday, 475 pp, £25.