"Seven shares in a gold mine" by Margaret Larkin

 "On Wednesday, September 24, 1952, a time bomb exploded in the forward baggage compartment of an airplane flying between Mexico City and Oaxaca." These are the first words of this true crime story. The author was on board the plane and recounts not only the immediate aftermath of the explosion but the ensuing police investigation. Seven of the passengers, poor people, had travel insurance for hundreds of thousands of pesos. It was clear that the explosion was deliberate. The investigation leads to charges and a trial. 

I read it years ago: it was a Readers' Union book club edition produced in 1960. I was fascinated then and the story gripped me again. It isn't just the crime itself, it is the insight it gives into what it was like in Mexico in the 1950s. For example, the capital was growing so rapidly that the landline telephone system couldn't keep up and the best way of getting a phone line was to buy shares in the telephone company. And the characters include the relationship between a Walter-Mitty-like no-hope dreamer and one of Mexico's leading opera singers. It would be great fiction and it is equally great fact. It reminded me of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

"Perhaps he made his fictions convincing to himself by nailing them down with slivers of truth." (Ch 14)

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I have been a big fan of the Readers' Union books which I inherited from the shelves of my parents. They have included:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony