Quiet Dell review – Jayne Anne Phillips's 'truth in fiction' - her best work yet

The American novelist's recreation of a real-life murder of a family is her best work yet

• 
• • Kate Kellaway - The Observer, Sunday 27 April 2014

The face of evil: Harry Powers (lying on the bed) talking to an unknown detective, 1931 or 1932. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Jayne Anne Phillips was first told about Harry Powers when she was a child. A murderous confidence trickster who preyed on wealthy, middle-aged women, his crimes transfixed America in the 1930s and haunted Phillips – like a bad dream from which it was not possible to wake. In 1931, Asta Eicher, recently widowed and with three children, advertised for "correspondence leading to true friendship, fidelity, and matrimony" through the American Friendship Society and was answered by Mr Powers in the po-faced, reverential courtship style that was his speciality. He promised to transport her to West Virginia. And he did, turning up in his gleaming automobile. He drove her away and murdered her, later returning for her children and killing them in a place called, with deadly irony, Quiet Dell.

Out of the Eichers' silence and the clamorous press reports of the period, Jayne Anne Phillips, high-flying American short-story writer and novelist, has conjured an extraordinary book – the best she has written. What she has pulled off is not the fleshing out of a crime in which the facts provide the backbone. For although she includes news, courtroom quotes, black-and-white photographs – intriguing and mournful souvenirs – the facts are scraps compared to the real substance of the novel, which is imagination itself: truth in fiction.

More