The Best We Can Do

The attentive reader of this blog will notice that I'm getting through a lot of books at the moment. There's a reason for that: I have bloody Covid, so I'm spending all my time lying on the couch reading. Ah well, silver lining to every cloud etc.

The Best We Can Do is such an odd little book. I bought it in my recent rush of infatuation with Sybille Bedford, and while her voice is still there, it's much more muted than it was in Jigsaw (which was published just after this book). The Best We Can Do is pretty much straight reportage of a trial that was a cause celebre in 1957, a very rare trial of a medical professional, a doctor who was accused of giving one of his patients, a rich old lady, an overdose of opiates to hasten her death. Much turns on nuances here -- did she die by overdose of morphine, or from natural causes after a stroke? Was the overdose given deliberately, accidentally on purpose, from compassion for her suffering, or in cold calculation with a legacy in mind? Dr Adams chose not to testify, and this case became important in establishing a precedent that such silence should not be held against the accused.

I must say I wasn't very impressed with the look of Dr Adams, he looks like a smug toad to me, judging from the photo on the cover. Sybille Bedford was convinced of his innocence, but according to Wikipedia it's pretty much accepted now that he was not just a murderer but a serial killer, 'hastening' the deaths of many rich old ladies and accumulating many handy legacies from their estates. Though true crime already existed as a genre in the 1950s, apparently Bedford was the first writer to see the potential for drama in an account of the trial alone -- we experience it just as any observer in the court might, or like a member of the jury, with Bedford's help to imagine tones of voice, ripples of consternation, satisfied smiles. 

From Jigsaw, I went into this book already knowing of Bedford's fascination with the justice system, and her personal experience of morphine addiction (via her mother). Neither of these are explicitly mentioned in The Best We Can Do but for me, they cast a shadow on every page.