Century £17.99 pp225

On Jimmy Goldsmith’s last day at Eton, he presented his housemaster with a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies as a leaving present. The master was touched by this unexpected kindness. The schoolboy then asked for the records back for a moment, and proceeded to smash them in front of him, one by one. Then he walked out without another word.

It is a chilling anecdote, but by no means exceptional in this riveting portrait of the notorious Clermont set (Goldsmith, John Aspinall and Lord Lucan, inter alia), a group distinguished by its wealth, arrogance, misanthropy and, ultimately, murder. John Pearson’s account does little for one’s faith in humanity, but it reads like a galloping Mayfair noir thriller.

The Clermont club was founded in 1962 by inveterate gambler Aspinall, in London’s Berkeley Square. Aspinall had learnt a great lesson early in life: the easiest way to make money is to find out what rich, stupid people want and sell it to them: £10,000 handbags, rubbish art or membership of “exclusive” gambling clubs. On Aspinall’s books were five dukes, eight viscounts and 17 earls. The childless Lord Derby lost £200,000 there in a single night, to Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat. A previous Lord Derby had been twice prime minister, and was offered the crown of Greece. The Clermont was the last gasp of lavish aristocratic decadence before the new puritanism of middle-class meritocracy took us all under its wing.

Aspinall himself appears to have been without wit, intelligence or charm. Pearson tells us he was handsome, so maybe the photographs reproduced here do him an injustice. Or perhaps it was his money and domineering coldness that did it for his three wives. The divorce of his first one, Jane, was sadistic, denying her money or access to their children on the grounds of her adultery. Aspinall was only truly happy with his third wife, Lady Sarah Curzon, praising her as “a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable”.

In the 1960s, Aspinall started keeping pet tigers as well as wives. His first was Tara, whom he would take out on a lead around Belgravia after dark. One night she attacked and killed an alsatian. Aspinall, who despised pet dogs as bourgeois, kicked the corpse into a basement and left it. Anyone who found fault with his behaviour or values was “middle-class” or “common”. The rest of humanity he dismissed as “the urban biomass”, and, as he constantly proclaimed, at least a billion urgently needed culling. When Richard Nixon told him that a nuclear missile could kill 2m people, he worried that this wasn’t enough.

Among Aspinall’s members was Lord Lucan, a dim, drink-sodden minor aristo on his uppers. By the 1970s, his favourite bedtime reading was Mein Kampf and, as Pearson powerfully shows, it was in the fetid, self-deluding, pseudo-Nietzschean atmosphere of this set that Lucan’s infamous plan to murder his wife was born. And on a rainy night in November 1974, this was how these sorry fantasies of übermensch pretension ended: with Lucan standing in the darkened kitchen of 46 Lower Belgrave Street, 2ft of lead piping in his hand. The nanny, Sandra Rivett, lay dead before him, her skull “virtually exploded” from the force of his blows. His lordship was covered in blood, cerebral tissue and shards of her skull, while Lady Lucan, bleeding heavily from head wounds, knelt at his feet trying to rip off his testicles. A charming vignette of superior primates at play.

Lucan got away, of course — with a little help from his friends. Pearson makes an interesting case for his subsequent murder rather than his simple disappearance, but we may never know the truth. The other members of the set went on to prosper, Goldsmith most spectacularly. His brand of “casino capitalism” earned him a fortune of £3 billion and a knighthood from Harold Wilson for “services to exports and ecology”. In the 1990s, he built his own Xanadu, Cuixmala, amid 2,000 acres of rainforest in Yucatan, Mexico. It had a gilded dome copied from the Taj Mahal and underground shelters for the coming nuclear apocalypse. In 1997, Goldsmith died of a heart attack; Aspinall died from cancer three years later. Today, Cuixmala lies deserted and overgrown with tropical vegetation, like some relic of a lost civilisation.

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