This is not really a historical fiction question, but I figured you guys were the best ones to ask!

My SIL lent us a movie called The Crown Prince, all about Crown Prince Rudolf of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Mayerling mystery. The movie was not bad! And I had never even heard of Mayerling and now I want to know more. I was quite surprised that I had never heard of it at all... I thought my historical knowledge was not bad!

Anyway, has anyone read anything about this? Are there any books out there (non-fiction preferably) that anyone can recommend?

After watching the movie I lean towards the view that he killed her, but after some research on the internet last night DH thinks they were both done in. It's worth finding a good book about, for sure!

Recommendations please!

I found a small number of books by searching Mayerling Rudolf on Amazon.com.

You might find a few more books searching Google Books. While you can search the text of books here, you usually can't read the whole book online. Try taking the titles to your library, or look for them used via book search engines like BookFinder.

I have compiled several book finding tools here.

Finally the query, Mayerling Rudolf, in the "Books" tab/interface at Worldcat.org finds 115 non-fiction works. Not all appear in English, so you may want to use the qualifiers available on the left-hand side of the page once the search results appear. Worldcat is a union catalog of more than 10,000 libraries around the world.

Good luck and have fun!

I haven't read anything at all about this, but it certainly sounds interesting. I wonder if Netflix has that movie...

I can think of one mystery novel about this: A Time for A Murder at Mayerling by Ann Dukthas (psudonym of the British historical mystery writer Paul Doherty).

I haven't read it yet. It's out of print, but I'm not sure if it's all that hard to find.

There was some kind of a series a while back about the heads of Eurpean royalty right before WWI and I think the Mayerling mystery was covered in it.  As an aside did anyone see the movie called the Illusionist (I think)?  Wasn't that supposed to be about a Mayerling like situation?

Genie - thanks for the suggestions!

Cheryl - I did actually see The Illusionist last year, but given that I knew nothing about Mayerling then I didn't put it together at all! It's very, very loosely based on it.... so loose you can hardly spot it.

There's an old movie from the 30's called "Mayerling," too, with Charles Boyer...I have no idea if it's available on VHS or DVD, though.