"Murder, They Wrote"
BREEN, JON L.
Murder, They Wrote The art of literary mayhem BY JON L. BREEN Why do we read true crime stories? Is it a voyeuristic interest in the details of someone else’s misfortune? Do we enjoy a...
...Among other cases given a poetical treatment are the drowning murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette (the 1906 case on which Theodore Dreiser would base An American Tragedy) and the 1930s robbery spree of Bonnie and Clyde—as penned with a surprising literary fl air by Bonnie Parker herself...
...Or perhaps our interest represents something more ennobling: a desire to understand the elements of the criminal justice system (police, courts, prisons), the conditions of society that breed crime, and the psychology of criminal behavior in the hope of making it all better...
...Political assassinations are not included, apart from Jos...
...It is drawn from The Record of Crimes in the United States (1834), a favorite book of crime buff Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is himself represented by an 1838 notebook entry about a waxworks featuring notorious murderers...
...He did not commence straightening up until Friday, when he found Mrs...
...He wore a dark, double-breasted suit of clothes with a white linen collar and a tie that had an almost indecorous stripe...
...Mencken, Dorothy Kilgallen), crime fi ction writers (Robert Bloch, James Ellroy), and true-crime specialists (Miriam Allen deFord, Albert Borowitz, Ann Rule...
...The Lindbergh kidnapping case is represented only by Edna Ferber’s article deploring the chic and trendy crowds at the 1935 trial of German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann...
...Editor Harold Schechter was wise to arrange the selections in True Crime chronologically by date of publication, allowing the reader to trace the development of attitudes toward crime and styles of true crime writing...
...Mart?’s 1881 article on the trial of Charles Guiteau, President Garfi eld’s unhinged killer...
...Simpson is mentioned only in passing...
...The last, concerning a notorious late 20th-century case, was published in 2001...
...Apart from Twain’s description of lawless Virginia City, there’s not much Old West action...
...In selections from the 1699 compilation Pillars of Salt, Cotton Mather follows short descriptions of murder, piracy, rape, bestiality, and other capital sins with page after page of dialogue between minister and the condemned on their way to the gallows...
...A section of murder ballads omits the shooting of Jesse James by the “dirty little coward” Robert Ford...
...The anonymous 1875 pamphlet, “Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend,” concludes of the 14-year-old multiple murderer: “The gallows is the proper doom of the wretched boy, who is as fi t to roam at large, or be confi ned in a weak cell as the tiger who has once tasted blood...
...An 1836 newspaper article on the Helen Jewett case by James Gordon Bennett pioneers the sensationalized tabloid approach to true crime, with a clear goal of selling newspapers...
...Abraham Lincoln’s account of an 1841 murder prosecution, absent a corpse and based on circumstantial evidence, was advanced as a cautionary note on capital punishment...
...An 1876 piece by Lafcadio Hearn offers a chilling account of a death house and botched hanging...
...Murder, They Wrote The art of literary mayhem BY JON L. BREEN Why do we read true crime stories...
...His 1926 piece “Hell Benders, or The Story of a Wayside Tavern” discusses the history of “wholesale murderers” before zeroing in on an 1870s case in which a series of travelers unfortunate enough to stop for the night at a Kansas tavern were murdered for fi nancial gain...
...Liebling looking back on the turn-of-the-century competition of New York dailies and the involvement of newspaper writers in real detective work...
...In a selection from Roughing It (1872) Mark Twain writes: When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men was impaneled—a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the streets were cognizant of...
...The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury...
...Perhaps it should not be surprising that writers of more than a century ago addressed issues that remain controversial today—the death penalty, the insanity plea, the effi cacy of the jury system, trying minors as adults—and with the same sorts of arguments...
...Jimmy Breslin on Son of Sam...
...Snyder nudging him toward that warm chair at Sing Sing...
...An anonymous piece on Jesse Strang, hanged in 1827 New York for the murder of his lover’s elderly husband, is the fi rst to resemble a contemporary true-crime article, essentially sober, factual, and detailed...
...His horn-rimmed spectacles have yellowish lenses, which, added to the jailhouse tan he has acquired, gave him a sickly complexion under the stand lamp by the witness stand with its three lights like a pawnbroker’s sign...
...While the element of titillation was always present, the initial goal of American true crime reportage was saving souls...
...Three brief pieces, one by Benjamin Franklin, represent the 18th century...
...Only two pieces come from the specialized true crime magazines that were a popular newsstand genre for most of the 20th century: a semi-fi ctionalized 1936 narrative by a deputy sheriff “as told to” Jim Thompson, and an account of Richard Speck’s killing of eight student nurses in 1966 Chicago by the prolifi c W.T...
...Though many classic cases are included, this book is not intended to be an encyclopedia of notorious American crimes...
...The 1892 Fall River, Massachusetts, murder of the Bordens is covered in the section of verse, though not by the famous jump-rope rhyme that begins “Lizzie Borden took an ax...
...Consider the following on one major actor in the drama: Gray stepped to the stand with a quick tread, and an almost soldierly bearing, which was most surprising in view of the fact he has looked all folded-up like an old accordion since the trial started...
...Gay Talese on a minor fi gure in the Manson case...
...It’s tempting to call the 1920s the peak period of great American crime writing...
...Besides those already mentioned, contributors include literary giants (Frank Norris, James Thurber, Truman Capote), celebrated journalists (Alexander Woollcott, H.L...
...Jon L. Breen is the author, most recently, of Eye of God...
...Brannon credits an astonishing number of police offi cers by name, presumably as an aid to getting their cooperation...
...In fact, the death sentence was overturned and Pomeroy lived until 1932, spending almost two-thirds of his 60-year prison sentence in solitary confi nement...
...The fi rst entry is a spare factual account from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1651) of the execution of a murderer who came over on the Mayfl ower...
...The fi nal essay, by Dominick Dunne, concerns Lyle and Erik Menendez, the privileged Beverly Hills brothers convicted of the 1989 murder of their parents...
...the magazine most frequently represented, with three selections, is the New Yorker...
...Do we enjoy a reminder that our own lives, mundane and uneventful by comparison, could be much worse...
...Post-twenties highlights are also plentiful: John Bartlow Martin on the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, an unsolved serial killing case in 1930s Cleveland that is as baffl ing as Jack the Ripper, if not as notorious...
...What initially looks like the dullest possible reading becomes oddly compelling as the subject of the exercise desperately strives for an acceptable level of repentance...
...Librarian Edmund Pearson brought a relaxed and elegant style, exemplary scholarship, and encyclopedic knowledge of criminal history to his essays, approaching each case like a wellread critic discerning innovations and infl uences in a new work of literature...
...At 67 pages, the compilation of his articles about the 1927 trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for the murder of Snyder’s husband Albert is the longest piece in the book...
...Such Hollywood cases as the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor and the rape trials of comedian Fatty Arbuckle are omitted, though the 1958 stabbing of gangster Johnny Stompanato by the daughter of Lana Turner is covered in a 1983 piece by Jay Robert Nash...
...In an era before television, Runyon provided the kind of novelistic description and detailed scene-setting that might not occur to a journalist of today, even one as gifted as he...
...Though it has a fascinating story to tell, it is one of the weakest pieces in the book, with a name-dropping celebrity/ tabloid sensibility, irrelevant lifestylesof-the-rich-and-famous details, meandering organization, and clich?ridden prose full of vague attributions of the “some said” variety...
...about 130 pages cover 19th and 20th century writings, comprising over three-quarters of the total page count...
...A chronicler quite different in style but equally impressive in achievement was Damon Runyon...
...Zora Neale Hurston on a black-on-white killing in the waning days of Jim Crow...
...Most likely we just appreciate nonfi ction writing with the high literary value that an excellent new anthology from the Library of America provides...
...It’s tempting to wonder if Schechter chose it to make a cautionary point about the state of contemporary true crime writing...
...Brannon, once known as the “dean of American crime writers...
...Books and newspapers are the most common sources...
...Ambrose Bierce wrote in 1868, “We yearn for a law making temporary insanity a capital offense...
...Schechter introduces each article with a note on the author and, where necessary, about the eventual outcome of the case...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 10
