True Crime and other excitements for 2022 (nohrt4me2)

Last year, a friend recommended Forever and Five Days by Lowell Cauffiel, the true crime story of lesbian lovers convicted of demonstrating their devotion with a murder pact resulting in the homicides of several residents in a Michigan nursing home.

I was fascinated by the way Cauffiel constructed the story in such a way as to appeal to our sense of empathy and desire for thrills in equal measure.

I suppose Truman Capote legitimized the true crime genre with In Cold Blood, which he called a "non-fiction novel." But these types of stories that delve into the motivations of real-life murderers and criminals have been floating around in modern Western literature since Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."

Nobody wants to be seen reading true crime in public--well, I don't, anyway--because even the best of it is lurid and exploitive. But we are all drawn to the darker impulses in the human soul, and the market for true crime is lucrative and enduring.

I doubt I can sustain a steady diet of true crime for the entire year, but what I manage to get through with thoughts about the genre I'll record here.

Possible TBRs:
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr (Orton/Halliwell murder/suicide)

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (murder of Osage tribal members in 1920s Oklahoma)

The Cult of We by Eliot Brown (WeWork)

A Very English Scandal by John Preston (Jeremy Thorpe, liberal MP, plots to murder his lover to further his political career; basis for the limited TV series)

Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston (bio of Ribert Maxwell, Brit media magnate found drowned near his yacht)

Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule (Southern belle turns out to be a sociopath).

The Greatest Hoax on Earth by Alan Logan (reporter posits that hoaxster Frank Abagnale's greatest hoax was that he never pulled the cons he bragged about in Catch Me if You Can)

Although I don't read true crime, I like your thoughts on the genre. I'll check back in. Happy new year!

>2 labfs39: Nobody admits to reading true crime. Or listening to Slim Whitman. Or eating Velveeta. Or wearing Jean Nate lemon body splash. Or having seen "Valley of the Dolls." I'm guessing nobody will want to be seen over here, either. I get it. But thank you for the encouragement!

I probably read one or two true crime books a year. I often find them as enjoyable as a good mystery, if they are written well. I have several on my Kindle waiting to be read.

>4 arubabookwoman: Please feel free to offer some recommendations! At some point, I will add the list of TBRs to my original post.

>3 nohrt4me2: I don't read true crime not because of some prejudice, but because I have a hard time reading about the sorts of violence that often occur in them. Yet I read a lot of books about the Holocaust, war, and genocide, which are violent on a large scale. I'm not sure why it's such a difficult genre for me.

>6 labfs39: Sometimes reading about the suffering of one person and their family is worse than reading about millions of dead people. Sort of the Anne Frank effect: The Holocaust is worse when it's about someone you knew, who had a personality, opinions, a future. It's not 6 million dead bodies anymore, but Anne Frank x 6 million.

Interesting rabbit hole you're digging in. I'll be following.

Before starting Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me about serial killer Ted Bundy, I am finishing up Marc Morris's The Anglo Saxons: A history of the beginnings of England.

Morris's is a chatty little history that selects one or two Major Figures from each century of the Anglo-Saxon period to focus on. I like the approach, but the book gets bogged down in too many territorial disputes and battles, is nearly devoid of women, and is puzzlingly silent (for the most part) on the primary Anglo-Celtic contribution to Western civilization in the so-called Dark Ages: book production.

But... I love Valley of the Dolls.

>9 nohrt4me2: such an appealing title of the Mac Morris book. hmm. But I had no idea there was a Celtic aspect of early book production.

>5 nohrt4me2: You may be sorry you asked. Here are some of the books I've tagged True Crime in my library. The ones marked with a * are ones I've reviewed. I note the ones I haven't read yet, but which sounded interesting to me.

*The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald--white collar/business crime. I loved it!
*The Good Nurse by Charles Graebert--another one I loved--a nurse killed 100's
*God'll Cut You Down by John Safran-murder by white supremicist in Mississippi
*American Kingpin by Nick Bilton--financial/internet crimes (Bitcoin)
*The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth-America's first serial killer, 1885 Austin
*And Never Let Her Go by Ann Rule--Ann Rule is always good
*Bad Blood--the saga of Elizabeth Holmes, just found guilty
*The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson-quirky story of theft of rare feathers/birds from natural history museum to make fishing lures
*American Predator by Maureen Callahan--search for elusive serial killer
*This House of Grief by Helen Garner-trial of Australian man who murdered his children
*I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara-Golden State Killer. I didn't like this one, but I was an outlier on that opinion.
*Victim F by Denise Hutchins-kidnapping victim and her boyfriend find themselves treated as criminals
*As If by Blake Morrison-the trial of the 2 10 year olds who kidnapped and killed a toddler. Should children be tried as adults?
*Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn-serial murderers Fred and Rose West in England
The True American by Anand Giridharadas-hate crime against Muslims
*Classic Crimes by W.N. Roughead-short accounts of historical crimes, NYRB
Lost Girls by Robert Kolker series of murders of young women on Long Island

Older ones I've loved:
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer--Gary Gilmore. See also Shot In the Heart by Mikal Gilmore, Gary Gilmore's brother, also very good.
Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
And 2 others. By Bugliosi that I liked:
Til Death Us Do Part, and
And the Sea Will Tell-murder on the uninhabited Pacific island Palmyra.
My Dark Places by James Ellroy-the murder of his mother

And here are a few that sounded good to me but which are still on my shelf unread:

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold-Jack the Ripper's victims
Unanswered Cries by Thomas French
Careless Whispers by Carlton Stowers
The Dark Heart by Joakim Palmkvist
Bayou of Pigs by Stewart Bell
The Daughters of Juarez by Teresa Rodriguez
The Rising: Murder Heartbreak and the Power of Human Resilience in an American Town by Ryan D'Agostino

>12 arubabookwoman: Thank you!

I highly recommend The Executioner’s Song.
Also by Ted Bundy’s girlfriend - The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy was reading this book during his trial -
The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality by Cleckley, Hervey M. (Hervey Milton), 1903-1984
There is an online copy of this book at https://cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF

>12 arubabookwoman: Bad Blood (on Theranos) interests me.

>16 dchaikin: Yes! There is a great podcast on Theranos, The Dropout. I have not tuned in since the verdict yesterday.

>16 dchaikin: Dan you might also like The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald--great unputdownable corporate crime saga, made into a not so good movie.

Jean, you always have an interesting focus for some of your reading. Like some others here, I don't read any true crime. But, you know I'm going to follow your reading anyway :-)

A couple of books exploring murderers:

Men of Blood: Murder in Everyday Life by Elliott Leyton
Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer by Elliott Leyton
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders

Agreeing with everyone about The Executioner's Song

>3 nohrt4me2: I admit to not reading True Crime. Can't think of one. Oh, unless the Salem book you sent me qualifies. Still reading the heredity book, but it's next.

>21 avaland: I think the Salem witch trial book definitely qualifies as True Crime, though it's a bit academic.

>3 nohrt4me2: Nobody admits to reading true crime. Or listening to Slim Whitman. Or eating Velveeta. Or wearing Jean Nate lemon body splash. Or having seen "Valley of the Dolls." I'm guessing nobody will want to be seen over here, either. I get it. But thank you for the encouragement!

That's pretty funny. I don't get the hate for Velveeta though -- it's better than something we get here in Canada called Kraft Singles, which have the exact taste and texture of the plastic they are wrapped in. Maybe I just have to try Velveeta again, but I remember liking it

>23 Nickelini: Kraft singles are pretty awful. We have them in Michigan. An incredible waste of plastic packaging.

I come from the Saginaw Valley, and Saturday night supper was fried Koegel ring baloney slices on grilled cheese made with Spatz bread, and a bowl of Campbell's tomato soup. My husband had a heart attack, so that's off the menu for him, but when he goes to visit his brother, I'll have myself a feast! Maybe while listening to Slim sing "I'll Remember You-oo."

>24 nohrt4me2: Kraft singles are pretty awful. We have them in Michigan. An incredible waste of plastic packaging. Right? Terrible for the planet, terrible for the body . . . just bad all around.

I come from the Saginaw Valley, and Saturday night supper was fried Koegel ring baloney slices on grilled cheese made with Spatz bread, and a bowl of Campbell's tomato soup. My husband had a heart attack, so that's off the menu for him, but when he goes to visit his brother, I'll have myself a feast! Maybe while listening to Slim sing "I'll Remember You-oo."

LOL - we both speak English, but I don't know so many of those words! I did love baloney as a child . . . and Prem (which is exactly the same thing as Spam). Campbell's tomato soup though . . . few things that make me gag more than that. I still have trauma from being forced to eat it at camp.

As for grilled cheese, well, that's turned into an art form, hasn't it! Many good versions, but I'm partial to Havarti on sourdough

I have a necklace with a grilled cheese sandwich charm on it. Got it on etsy.

>26 dianeham: that's awesome

I like true crime! I don't read a lot of it but I just finished a good one called Blood in the Water by Silver Donald Cameron. It is set in Cape Breton and I’m not sure how wide spread it might be to get a copy. sassylassy might be able to get it - it was really good!
I also rec Bad Blood and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
Charlotte Gray wrote a couple historical true crime books which combine the social and historical background of the time, which added a lot to the story.

Another book for your list: Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper

>25 Nickelini: Mmm, havarti. I didn't know there were more than three kinds of cheese until I became a hipster in my mid-20s. Hee.

We sometimes had pancakes and Spam for supper. It wasn't too bad if you drowned it in maple syrup.

>28 raidergirl3: Excellent! Thank you for the recommendations. I will check them out!

Here's some Slim Whitman. He'll grow on you. Mellow and wholly un-ironic.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OR2eylNc_4Y

Completed: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule.

Ann Rule, an ex-cop and pulp crime writer, works with serial killer Ted Bundy at a Washington state crisis hotline. Ted seems like a real nice, empathetic young man. As it becomes possible that he might also be killing pretty young women with long hair parted in the middle, Rule decides to write a book about the killings and to maintain contact with Ted while he is in jail.

There are often two stories in True Crime: The story of the crime. And the story of how the writer got the crime story. About halfway through this book, I became far more interested in Ann Rule than in Ted Bundy.

At the time she met Bundy, Rule was a divorced mother of four, a psychology student, and struggling financially. Then she pitched the "Ted" murders to a publisher. The pitch seems to have occurred before she connected her friend Ted with the suspect known as Ted, but that chronology is fuzzy, possibly on purpose. What is clear from her own narrative is that Rule maintained correspondence with Bundy throughout his incarcerations and trials. She also walked a fine line between communicating with Bundy and providing info to the cops investigating him.

In any event, The Stranger Beside Me became a bestseller on several lists, including the New York Times, in its first edition in 1980. It went through four editions over 28 years, each with updates, corrections, and details, keeping the Bundy story fresh for new generations of readers. As a result of these updates, the book becomes somewhat disorganized and the tone in later editions is less confused and more hostile to Bundy.

However, the book launched Rule on a lucrative career. She was invited to make TV appearances and was paid for speaking to law enforcement groups about serial killers. She received advances and royalties for more than 30 subsequent True Crime books that she would write in the course of her career.

Rule died in 2015 worth $10 million, and Ted Bundy was her cash cow, something Bundy was well aware of. He wrote her a letter, included in the book, from death row: "Since you have seen fit to take advantage of our relationship, I think it only fair that you share your great good fortune with my wife. Please send her $2,300--or more."

On one hand, the story of Bundy's crimes is detailed in a fairly restrained way. We understand the power of Bundy's compulsive rampages. In his penultimate crime, he managed to attack five women in two locations over a 45-minute period in Florida, attacks so brutal that two of the women died instantly. Rule's information about evidence collecting and analysis in the days before DNA identification are always interesting. Her trial reporting is a little less compelling.

On the other hand, Rule inserts herself into the story with increasingly frequent reminders that she actually knew Ted Bundy and that that is just tearing her up inside! In truth, her acquaintance with Bundy sometimes seems exaggerated. She also goes overboard in casting herself as a mother figure in Bundy's life. She offers a somewhat self-aggrandizing account of her attempt to save Bundy from himself by getting him to confess his crimes to her, which she believes would have prevented his execution. Later, she seems jarringly all-in on his execution and comments disgustedly on the cost of Bundy's incarceration and appeals to Florida taxpayers ($6 million, at one point).

But Rule, by her own admission, was just one of hundreds of women Bundy manipulated for emotional and financial support while in jail. She was not his savior or likely even as special to him as she wants us to believe.

None of my comments about Rule should be taken as a criticism of the book. Quite the contrary. Rule's narrative, in which she gins up agony over "the Ted I knew" (not really all that well) and outrage over Bundy the killer, whose execution she comes to believe is more than warranted, reflects the way evil eventually affects us all. It is seductive, dishonest, jealous, and craves our full attention. We are destined to be betrayed by the evil that transfixes us, but not until it mixes us up and infects us with self-loathing for that transfixion.

Like many True Crime writers, Rule tries to find a higher purpose in her work. She writes early on in the book: "I have somehow felt guilty--because I make my living from other people's tragedies. When I told victims' families how I felt, they put their arms around me and said, 'No. Keep on writing. Let the public know how it is for us.'"

But there is precious little about the victims' families in Rule's book. One senses that Bundy never quite released Rule from her fascination with him. Her subliminal challenge to us as readers is to gauge just how able we are, by extension, to resist that fascination ourselves.

>32 nohrt4me2: There are always two stories in True Crime: The story of the crime. And the story of how the writer got the crime story.

Sometimes the second story is the more interesting.

Huh. I hadn't thought about that. True.

>32 nohrt4me2: Have you read We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence? It speaks very much to that point, and in fact the crime itself takes a back seat to the writer's pursuit of the story. The resolution of the case turns out not to be all that satisfying, but it pulls in a lot of tangential trains of thought, particularly around sexism and academia, that are interesting by themselves.

>34 lisapeet: No, have not heard of that one, but sounds interesting. Thanks for the rec!

>32 nohrt4me2: she spoke with him without knowing he was a serial killer? How? Why? wow.

>36 dchaikin: Watch this space for details when I finish her book! Rule, imo, whitewashes lots of her own motives, manipulations, and intentions in this big, messy book.

>32 nohrt4me2: Completed review of The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule.

Now reading Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule

>32 nohrt4me2: "I think it only fair that you share your great good fortune with my wife. Please send her $2,300"

This whole aspect is so strange to me. Excellent review.

>39 dchaikin: Interesting aside re Bundy's request for money: There are laws that prevent criminals from making a profit on their memoirs. Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black, gave all the proceeds to a women's prison program.

I don't know if a kickback from Rule's royalties would have been legal then or now. Bundy fathered a child in prison, and none of the money made off Bundy's story has ever gone to her, as far as I know.

Rule did send Bundy money in small amounts many times, and she mentions this quite a lot. Perhaps this is her way of mitigating Bundy's demand that royalties go to his wife.

>40 nohrt4me2: His wife wrote a book too.

>41 dianeham: Really? I couldn't find that she had written one. It was my assumption that she left Bundy and more or less faded from public view in order to shield their daughter.

Elizabeth Kendall, his long-time girlfriend, wrote Phantom Prince.

I don't want to read about Bundy any more, though. I am also going to pass on Vince Bugliosi's Helter Skelter and probably not re-read In Cold Blood.

I thought he and Kendall were married. My mistake.

The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. According to the book description: This updated, expanded edition of The Phantom Prince, Elizabeth Kendall’s 1981 memoir detailing her six-year relationship with serial killer Ted Bundy, includes a new introduction and a new afterword by the author, never-before-seen photos, and a startling new chapter from the author’s daughter, Molly, who has not previously shared her story.

>43 dianeham: Everything about Bundy seems to elicit hype and hysteria, doesn't it? I remember that when he was executed some of my coworkers ran out to get the tabloid paper that ran his post-execution pictures, the "Dead Ted" photos.

Bundy was married to Carole Ann Boone while he was on trial, and they managed to have a child while he was in prison. Boone refused to talk to Ann Rule. It was rumored that Boone died in 2018.

Kendall did talk to Rule under an alias ("Meg") for "Stranger Beside Me."

Completed Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule

Pat Allanson, the subject of this book, did two prison terms for poisoning her husband's grandparents with arsenic (they had money she wanted) and severely doping an elderly couple under her care while posing as a nurse (they had stuff she wanted to steal, and Halcion made it easier to lift jewelry, Civil War mementos, and antique cookbooks). When last seen in author Ann Rule's book, Allanson had been released from her second prison term and was ramming around McDonough, Georgia, creeping out the locals who were familiar with her story.

According to her immediate family, Pat Allanson was a dainty little lady prone to conveniently timed fainting spells, adept at making fussy little costumes and accouterments for her antique doll collection, and just as sweet as sugar pie. According to prosecutors, cops, and extended family members, Pat Allanson was a cold and manipulative conniver who railroaded her husband to prison for shooting his parents, drove her brother to suicide, and possibly poisoned her daughter and grandson.

Rule takes 500+ pages to report Allanson's crimes and misdeameanors. A common criticism of True Crime books is that the author could have told the story to better effect in about half the number of pages, and that's certainly true here.

But the bigger problem in this book is that, despite the details at her disposal, Allanson ends up characterized as a fairly stereotypical psychotic Southern belle. Think Emily Grierson in William Faulkner's fictional short story, "A Rose for Emily," who paints china and turns out to have poisoned her gentleman caller with arsenic AND SLEPT WITH HIS CORPSE!!

Except that there's no great ending like this in "Everything She Always Wanted."

We know that Allanson's Southern heritage will play a large part in the story from the book's opening chapter, which describes the town of Zebulon, Georgia, where Allanson lived on her dream horse ranch. Zebulon's town square is a "blur of trees--pine, dogwood, magnolia, and oak." Its "kudzu vine creeps along the orange earth, smothering each thing it covers, an emerald parasite." "Emerald" is also the word used to describe Pat Allanson's striking green eyes, a not-so-subtle way to connect Rule's villain with a plant that kills anything in its path. (Rule also manages tell us about Allanson's carefully coiffed bouffant ... just like Dolly Parton's, I presume.) There is a stone memorial to "honor 17 white Zebulon boys who died in World War II ... only one name is listed under the chisled "colored" in the lower right corner. E.R. Parks remains segregated even on a heroes' memorial" (an odd touch, since race plays no part in this story.) There are "Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper machines" dotted around mainstreet, the ubiquitous pick-up trucks, and even mention of a "yellow dog." Zebulon, Rule notes, was the site of a movie starting Andy Griffith and Johnny Cash.

The perfect breeding ground for a Southern psychobiddy, if I ever read one.

God knows that as a fifth-generation Michiganian (don't call me a "Michigander," a pejorative term coined by Honest Abe Lincoln), I've always found the American South far more foreign than Canada, which I can almost see from my house! I'm certainly willing to concede that regional culture affects our manners and attitudes. Perhaps it's even true that regional culture affects a criminal's m.o. That's an interesting idea that Rule might have explored along with a more in-depth psychological analysis of Allanson's very weird family. But she didn't, and so we are left with an unsatisfyingly flat criminal to contemplate.

Fun fact: Rule's book was made into a Lifetime TV two-part movie staring Gina Gershon and Ryan McPartlin. It might be more fun than the book. It would certainly be shorter ...

>45 nohrt4me2: Great review. I hadn't thought about "A Rose for Emily" in a long time, but as soon as you mentioned it, it came back full force.

>46 labfs39: The book is a page turner because Rule sets you up to expect something pretty astounding. But in the end I felt gypped.

I used to like to play a reading for "A Rose for Emily" to my intro to lit students. I wouldn't assign it ahead of time so that they would all hear it for the first time together. You could see them resisting the implications of those gray hairs in the indentation on the pillow at the end or offering alternate conclusions.

>45 nohrt4me2: I'll pass, but interesting crime story and terrific review.

Finished The Greatest Hoax on Earth and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Reviews coming.

Now on The Devil in the White City. Then to a dystopian break with Kay Dick's They.

Completed The Greatest Hoax on Earth by Alan C. Logan

Reporter Alan C. Logan's thesis is this: We live in an age in which the truth is in danger, hoaxers thrive, and we all need to throw some cold water on our happy fantasies and learn to deal with a common set of facts, if not reality.

Logan submits for our approval his takedown of perennial hoaxer Frank ("Catch Me If You Can") Abagnale. Logan proves that Abagnale is a master deceiver, but not in the way that his autobiography or the movie made from it with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio would have you believe.

Nope.

What really happened is that Abagnale spent a lot of time in jail or on the lam from local cops making up stories about how he was an airline pilot, a pediatrician, an assistant prosecutor, worked for the FBI, etc. The Greatest Hoax here is that Abagnale never pulled off any of the hoaxes he claimed.

Logan spends pages and pages telling us the story Abagnale concocted, then offers evidence to show that Abagnale was in none of the places he claimed, and finally offers proof of where Abagnale actually was.

Midway through the book, there's a handy dual timeline (weirdly illustrated with a curvy little cartoon stewardess) that shows where Abagnale claimed to be alongside a list of places that Logan proved he really was.

This is, as if the cartoon stewardess didn't give it away, a self-published book. There are myriad other giveaways. It is loaded with quotes about truth and hoaxes from everybody to Lord Byron to Mark Twain on just about every third page. These are often off-topic and slow the pace of the story. There are also a lot of exclamation marks! OMG!! And sometimes the prose is absolutely incomprehensible. Here's Logan's opening:

Many epic tales must be viewed across the expanse of time, as the lens of history gently refocuses the past, drawing its characters into new light, to offer redemption in a greater truth. And this story is no different. But its truth is not yet set into stone, and the final chapters are still to unfold.

Ye gods.

There are other tics. In some misguided attempt to maintain journalistic distance, Logan refers to himself as "this author." Worse are his awkward or misused words: "beclowned," "inferring" (when "implying" is meant), or "fantasia" (for "fantasy"). These just a few examples from the the first 70 pages, with more than 400 to go.

Logan and Anne Rule (two of whose works are reviewed above) are both what I'll call "reportorial" True Crime authors. That is, they report conversations and info from the public record--police reports, court transcripts, deeds, etc. They do a lot of digging and they tell you where they got their info.

The appeal of reportorial True Crime is that it feels raw and immediate. The literary touches are often clunky, and you end up feeling kind of sad that the authors did kind of a crummy job gilding the lily. Because Logan does do a great job showing how Abagnale operated. First he fooled the people who supposedly vetted guest appearances on "Truth or Consequences" and Johnny Carson's show ... and then he used his appearances there to further bolster the credibility of his claims. Once the entertainment machine decides you're legit and an audience loves your story, it is pretty easy for people to willingly suspend their credulity. It's certainly a story worth hearing and learning from, but some editing would have improved the book by a wide margin.

Completed The Devil and the White City by Erik Larson and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Both these books are outstanding in their ability to evoke a sense of time and place: Chicago in 1892 and Savannah in the 1980s. I learned all about soil structure in Chicago and how it impeded skyscraper construction for a time as well as how to get hard water build-up out of a Savannah toilet (use a brick like a pumice stone).

Both authors also divert from the "reportorial" True Crime books reviewed above and are more in line with literary nonfiction, in the cast of Capote's masterpiece, "In Cold Blood." The books contain a lively cast of characters and recreate conversations from first-hand reporting or exhaustive document records review.

Some readers may not like the organizational sprawl of the books, especially in "Devil." Larson moves between the construction of the 1892 world's fair (the White City) and the story of serial killer H.H. Holmes (the Devil). Holmes's story is also one of construction, specifically of his square-block Castle Building replete with secret rooms, vaults, dark hallways, gas lines that can be used to asphyxiate unsuspecting sleepers, and dissection chambers. Holmes used the fair to attract and lure victims--mostly young women--to his building during the hectic days of the fair. I found the transitions between the two stories just fine, all of a piece with Gilded Age Chicago.

It's really not clear where Berendt is going with his story until you get to the central murder plot several chapters in. However, Berendt's description of Savannah's social structure and personalities is so much fun that you really don't care. It's sort of like driving around a strange place just taking in the scenery with stops to chat with the locals until, yikes!, one of the city's leading citizens gets accused of murdering his handyman and sometime lover.

Both books were exciting and a pleasure to read because the writing is a cut above the pulp and sensationalism that plagues many books in this genre.

>51 nohrt4me2: I like how you compared and reviewed the two books together. Larson's book was terrific, as you noted. I haven't found any other of his books quite as compelling as Devil in the White City. Now I am even more interested in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

>51 nohrt4me2: I enjoyed both of those. I found their structure let you not worry too hard about suspending your disbelief and just go along for the ride—they were well written and kept up a good pace.

>32 nohrt4me2:, >45 nohrt4me2: - Interesting reviews-we had several Ann Rule books around when I was growing up because she was a local author and my dad had a crime-adjacent job.

The perfect breeding ground for a Southern psychobiddy, if I ever read one.
Heh heh.

>54 DieFledermaus: Rule is an interesting figure. Certainly the Queen of True Crime for many years. She churned out 35 books in 34 years, between 1980 and 2014. Plus TV appearances and seminars. She must have been quite a dynamo.

>51 nohrt4me2: I enjoyed your review of the Eric Larson.

Completed They by Kay Dick (not True Crime). Dystopian experimental novella comprised of discrete chapters in the first person, but probably not the same person in each chapter.

Each narrator is beset by a society in which communication, emotion, and the arts are suspect, and people are taken to institutions where their emotions and memories are wiped. Recurring images include walking a dog, being at the beach, meeting with like-minded friends for furtive visits, and being under surveillance and being subject to vandalization of books, paintings, music, etc.

The chapters are like little fragments of found journals, so the reader has to piece together what's going on and never really learns how things came to this pass. This is apparently a departure for Dick from her other, more linear novels.

I enjoyed it!

Now reading The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko. Not True Crime. Just taking some time to "read in solidarity" with the people of Ukraine.

Just checking in :-) Your "read in solidarity" is a nice gesture, I may join you....ETA I have ordered a novel by an Ukraine author should come tomorrow....

>59 avaland: That's cool! The Zabuzhko book is a wonderful. It is 700 pages of free association and dense stream of consciousness. And if someone had told me that, I would have said, no thanks. But it is full of wonderful vignettes, history, literary ideas, and imagery. It is something that has to be read slowly, but that's ok. I will post some excerpts as I go.

Let me know what book you picked out.

>60 nohrt4me2: Picked out Sweet Darusya: A Tale Of Two Villages by Maria Matios (2019). Here's what World Literature Today says about it: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2019/summer/sweet-darusya-tale-two-villages...

>58 nohrt4me2: >61 avaland: I picked up both of these recently, though I'm not sure when I'm going to get to them—I've got some work reading on my plate. But they both look like they'll be interesting reads in extremely different ways.

While finishing some non True Crime books, here's an insightful podcast episode by Chelsea Weber-Smith about the psychology behind the American interest in true crime stories from her American Hysterics show. https://player.fm/series/american-hysteria/true-crime

Missing you....

>64 avaland: I have sure been scarce, huh? I got stalled on one of the Victorian novel selections, and now my True Crime books are piling up behind it. I have Bern trying to check on on the Avid Readers, tho.

Two Victorian True Crime books that have been engrossing and got me off a long reading dry spell:

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is about Jack Whicher, one of London's first and finest police detectives. English detective fiction arose simultaneously with the police detective.

Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants details the all-women organized crime syndicate located in London's Elephant and Castle district between the world wars.

More to add when I finish with the Elephants.

>66 nohrt4me2: Yay for books that end reading slumps!

>60 nohrt4me2: - I'll be interested in any comments on the Zabuzhko. It's on the pile (somewhere) and the size is a bit daunting. I don't think I've come across anyone else who has read it (maybe it'll get a boost in popularity given current events).

>68 DieFledermaus: I like the book, though I have set it aside for awhile. It is interesting, even dazzling in spots. But she rejects narrative structure in favor of long, long chapters of stream of consciousness. Her notion seems to be that narrative structure is an attempt to impose a particular reality on the reader. She seems to want the reader to develop his own construction of thoughts and events. Maybe think of looking at a photograph of a group of people and having to reach your own conclusions about what's going on.

I find the idea a little artificial and disingenuous. Even subtleties like editing sentences, correcting errors, and deciding where to put chapter breaks "lead" the reader to infer things in a certain way.

You do learn a lot about Ukrainian history and culture, especially the way in which Russian culture has influenced or submerged it, by reading the book.

Moving off True Crime for a bit.

Scarfed up The Greenlanders, interesting fictitious account of the failed Norwegian settlement in Greenland. Written in an eddic style (doesn't work that well, imo), it makes an interesting allegory for how society's fall apart under the stresses of climate change, famine, disease, superstition, demagoguery, and putting individual feuds over community cohesion.

Also finished The Terranauts, the setting inspired by the real-life failed Biosphere experiments. Compelling, if ultimately awful, characters, though the plot seems contrived and hackneyed. Not up to Boyle's best, which is Drop City, imo.

Agree with you about The Terranauts. I thought it was interesting, but some of the characters acted like they were still in junior high.

>70 nohrt4me2: Interesting observation on the Smiley book.

>72 avaland: I am in one of my Nordic moods. Reading about Halldora Bjornsson's translation of Beowulf and the recent linguistic theory that Old English was a Norse dialect and early medieval England was a Norse colony. Must be that smidge of Scandinavian from my Yorkshire grandmother coming out ...

The Lost Daughter a freebie by Elena Ferrante, or whoever she is/they are. Wanted to see if I liked the writing enough to plow thru the Neapolitan cycle. Still thinking, tho I did like the novella, despite, even because of, it's contrivance (the doll) and the high emotional pitch. It reminded me a lot of Daphne DuMaurier's "The Scapegoat" in use of devices and tone.

Reading a Dean Koontz novel now. Because I have never read one. Another freebie. Later: Well ... apparently there is a sex cult of rich liberals who kill people, but it's out in the desert, not in the basement of a pizza parlor. This is rightwing testosterone-fueled giddy up cowboy shit right here. One Dean Koontz is enough in this lifetime.

>70 nohrt4me2: I've had The Greenlanders sitting on the shelf for ages, and that's encouraging me to give it a shot at some point. Maybe when the summer gets a bit hotter and I need some cold-climate reading...

>75 lisapeet: The Greenlanders was written in 1988, so pretty sure Smiley didn't intend for it to address the current political situation. But the parallels got awfully close for comfort toward the end.

Blue Light by Walter Mosley. I just didn't get it. At all.

Basically, a Blue Light from outer space transforms some people and gives them some random super powers. A man dying of cancer becomes the personification of death and, being Death, tries to kill everybody. There are hardboiled detectives, a grove of singing sequoia trees, some helpful bears, and a one-eyed coyote with six pups. There is also a lot of Weird Sex, evisceration, dreaming, dreaming under the influence of dope, and a commune in the woods.

Not that a good writer like Mosley couldn't pull all that together and make a good book of it. But it's not this book.

I usually don't care what the reviewers say, but I wanted to see if maybe I was missing something. Here's Kirkus, which I think was kind: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/walter-mosley/blue-light/

I read this on the strength of The Man in My Basement, a very weird and wonderfully original racial thriller, but this is a whole other deal.

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill.

Interesting dive into metafiction: There's the crime fiction writer involved with a sinister fan. There's the crime story the crime fiction writer is writing about a crime fiction writer. And there's the crime story the crime fiction writer in the crime story is writing.

Now on Gentill's After She Wrote Him. So far, a writer has made up a character who is a lawyer writing a crime novel. And the lawyer crime writer is writing a novel about the writer. So which one is real? There's an artist involved, I think.

It's a very clever head trip. You can get a similar rush by taking a couple hits off some edibles and standing between two mirrors facing each other and waving at yourself. Not sure there's anything deep here, but it's fun.

Then on to a Teddy Wayne novel. Then a true crime from Australia. Then I hope we will be out of this god awful oppressive July.

Hot where you are too, huh? I'm in Maine and it's been hot and extremely dry. Then the last two days we've had thunderstorms with incredible wind, knocking out our electricity, but with only brief rain.

>79 labfs39: I'm in Michigan, and we are looking at another stretch of humid 90-degree days starting Monday. We have not had nearly enough Everyone has asthma and sinus problems. I guess I should be grateful no violent weather. Give me blizzards and snow shoveling any day over this. Ugh!

>78 nohrt4me2: "very heavy head trip" -- I'm not tempted... :-)

>79 labfs39:, >80 nohrt4me2: Hoping for more rain and less heat for all of us! (90s and humid over the rest of the week...bleh)

>81 avaland: I liked the Gentill books very much, and I want to read more. I think there's more to them than tricky plotting, though that ride alone is certainly interesting.

So far humidity hasn't become oppressive, though I have the AC on for a couple of hours in the evening just to blow out the fug and cool things down for the overnight. Trying not to overtax the grid.

Tomorrow and Wednesday look like the worst days for heat/humidity combo.

All we can do is grit our teeth and think of January!

>78 nohrt4me2: Great—that'll save me the trouble of getting those two mirrors set up. But seriously, I have that on the pile just because I always go for books set in libraries, even though they're disappointing at least half the time, so I'm glad to hear there's something to that one.

Hot and nasty here in NYC, too. I'm so, so glad to be working from home and not dealing with the subway system in weeks like this.

This House of Grief by Helen Garner is a True Crime account of the trial of Rob Farquharson, an Australian divorced father who deliberately drove his car into a deep lake one dark night and drowned his three young sons. Garner is less interested in recreating the murders and delving into Farquharson's mindset than she is in recording the way the trial affects witnesses, lawyers, jurors, family, and spectators.

Garner's book rarely bogs down, and she has some interesting observations about the adversarial legal system that is designed as a win-lose competition rather than forum for getting at the truth.

The Journalist and the Murderer is Janet Malcolm's coverage of the case that convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald brought against journalist Joe McGinniss. McGinniss was made part of MacDonald's defense team so he could cover the trial from the inside and parlay it into a book. He agreed to pay MacDonald a cut of the advance and royalties.

The rub came when McGinniss became convinced that MacDonald was guilty, but pretended to believe in his innocence to keep him talking. When the book came out, MacDonald, now in prison, was blindsided and outraged, and sued McGinnis for fraud.

Malcolm finds both these characters unsavory and uses her account of the fraud trial to make endless claims about the exploitive nature of the journalist-subject relationship. Her observations are filtered thru her own journalistic writing about psychoanalysis, and she often makes sweeping generalizations about human behavior as if they were not debatable. This gets hard to take at times.

However, both books try to write about True Crime in a larger context. These aren't thrill stories so much as thoughtful accounts of what criminal behavior and ensuing trials reveal about our larger society.

Finishing July as planned with Teddy Wayne's The Great Man Theory. It's about a divorced sad sack adjunct English instructor who gets jacked around while having to live with his elderly mother who is increasingly seduced by a FOX-like news channel. The general sense of frustration, dread, and rage is amplified by the ever-present news about the Trump administration (though His Horrorship is never named). Not the greatest book to read if you are a retired liberal arts academic with lots of time on your hands to contemplate your life mistakes. But I'm soldiering on.

It's a muggy day in Michigan, but not too hot. Like summer days I remember as a kid instead of these dry 90+ stretches we have coming up next week. July and August, which used to be fair and festival season, are now as unpredictable to make plans for as January and February. That's four months out of the year with risky weather conditions.

On the plus side, the humming birds have been coming around a lot to visit the rose of Sharon bushes and trumpet vine.

Coda: "The Great Man Theory" turns away into something like "Falling Down," the movie with Michael Douglas, in which impotent rage runs amok. I can't say it wasn't a page-turner or didn't capture something about our present moment in national life. But I didn't expect that turn of events, and it mars the book a bit.

Now on Teddy Wayne's Apartment, two grad students enrolled in an MFA writing program become roommates. The guys are unevenly matched in talent, social class, political outlook, and sex appeal, all outlined in a slow reveal. Tensions will mount, but unclear when or how they will resolve. This will catch me up on Wayne's novels, the best of which, imo, is Kapitoil.

Should close out July with this one. Then have Mary Wesley's Jumping the Queue, her debut novel published when she was 70.

Reading has been desultory and frequently off-theme, but have moved out of the slump I was in earlier this year. Sultry summer weather leaves me easily tired and not good for much other than reading.

Learned that my cousin Phil, whom I haven't seen for 30+ years, has died of covid. They're having his memorial service in his favorite bar. Given that this is likely where he caught covid, I'm begging off going by pleading chronic illness.

>86 nohrt4me2: I'm sorry to hear of your cousin's passing. Probably wise to skip the memorial service. My uncle died of covid, fortunately the service was outdoors, but I still kept my masked distance.

Apartment was kind of a wash. Mostly a meditation on intimacy and loneliness. A sad sack MFA student invites a more attractive and virile MFA student to live with him. There's no homoeroticism--or any eroticism--just a privileged East Coast white guy confronted with hard scrabble Midwest white guy. Predictable outcome.

John Barth has jumped the queue in front of Mary Wesley. On The Floating Opera since my recent flirtation with meta fiction was fun. Also have The End of the Road for after that.

My drains are gurgling, which means there are probably roots in there and I need someone to run a snake down the line. Chad and Kyle, the happy plumbers, are busy running porta johns to and from the county fair this week and unclogging whatever gets messed up out there, so I am on standby. Hopefully they will have an emergency call out this way and will be able to come before next week. These guys love their work, never fail to get excited about what comes out with the drain snake. Last time, they hunkered over a huge mat of mint roots and poked it with a stick. "Don't that smell just like Vick's VapoRub?" they asked.

>85 nohrt4me2: We are having much the same weather here. And yes, I also have hummingbirds on my feeders and various bushes including the Rose of Sharon bushes (OMG, I have trumpet vine everywhere, a legacy of the previous owners, tell me what to do!) Nearby, there is some poison ivy growing under one of the hydrangeas....

Glad you are out of your book slump...I have found that I need more flexibility with my reading these days.

Sorry to hear of your cousin's death but I'm glad you are protecting yourself. Booster this fall, again. All three of my grandchildren (ages 2-7) and two of my three children, and one of two sons-in-law have had it.

Here's hoping Chad and Kyle have an opening for you soon .... (ok, that wasn't as funny as I thought it was going to be)

>90 avaland: Chad and Kyle would find it hilarious.

Not sure what you can do to kill trumpet vines. Mine is kept in check by the even more invasive bittersweet that grows next to it on the pergola. I thought I got rid of my hops plant, but it has sprung up n the back hedge with a vengeance. Can I pick em or what. Maybe a blow torch ...

Enjoying Barth.

I went to clean the trap under my kitchen sink, and it was like clowns piling out of a clown car. I had to keep taking off one more length of pipe and declogging it, until I had worked my way through the floor and six feet through the basement. The previous owner must have never used a plug in the sink because it was PACKED. My little snake couldn't touch it. I could have used a Chad-and-Kyle.

>92 labfs39: Ung, quite a job! We have lived here for 35 years and, sadly, cannot blame the previous owners.

>89 nohrt4me2: I read lots of John Barth when I was in my 20s. I even met him once at an event - he was the event so I assume he was reading. I told him how much I liked his books and he seemed to think that was strange. Sot Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy were my favorites.

>94 dianeham: I met many authors while teaching and working at the state library association. Mostly I'd say writers are for reading, not meeting.

PS, there were some delightful exceptions, Canadian humorist Bill Richardson and the late YA author Nancy Garden among them.

>95 nohrt4me2: I met Connie Willis at a library event. She was delightful. She talked about her research for To Say Nothing of the Dog especial Victorian forks.

>96 dianeham: I enjoyed The Doomsday Book. Not a comedy, though, due to Black Death and all.

>96 dianeham: >97 nohrt4me2: I liked both To Say Nothing of the Dog which was hysterical (the jumble sale?) and The Doomsday Book, which was not, but was a five star read for me. I've read several others by her and liked the one about the Titanic and the ones about the Blitz too.

Willis is someone I've always meant to read. Probably either of those two you mentioned, Lisa.

>99 lisapeet: I think those two are her best. The only ones I wouldn't recommend, of the seven I've read, are Bellwether and Lincoln's Dreams.

>91 nohrt4me2: Oh yes, the bittersweet. At least that can be yanked out most of the time.

Another Connie Willis fan. It's been a long time since I read her, though. I don't think I've read anything since Passage though.