When you're reading a true crime account published by a university press, you're in for either treat or torture. Professional historians and other academic types who write true crime (usually while calling it something else) are invariably either terrific writers or plain awful. And sometimes they make boo-boos for their peers to pick apart.
That fact adds another interesting layer onto the subgenre, for I've also discovered the delights of book reviews of academic tomes. My, my, those plaid-jacketed, nearsighted, fireside-sitting academic types can wield a red pen with brutal aim.
The Law and History Review, a publication from the University of Illinois Press, has posted online book reviews of such titles as --
Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (Cornell University Press) - The bizarre story of a murder in New England in 1673 -- or at least one hopes it was a murder, since someone was hanged for it.
A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford University Press) - If you've never heard of the seventeenth century's most bizarre sexual scandal, this will be a treat. And there's an execution in this tale too.
Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Duke University Press) - Lesbians who brutally murder one another in public: apparently more common in the past than it is today.
Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (University of British Columbia Press) - "Sex, adultery, insanity, murder, suicide and cultism" -- and it's not by Ann Rule.
There is one press that must be singled out in the discussion. Kent State University Press is the unabashed champion of the field; its True Crime Series is edited by attorney and noted crime author Albert Borowitz and features some interesting titles. (Borowitz also happens to have amassed what I believe is the largest true crime library in the world (see this post)).
One of the best university-issued true crime books I've read was the wonderfully written book, A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France, by James R. Farr from Duke University Press, a dense, meaty, cleverly constructed, and richly rewarding whopper of a true crime story called the Giroux Affair.
And maybe it's just me, but university presses seem to have much better cover art departments than the folks at St. Martin's True Crime Library.
So, you true crime fans out there, don't shy away from a book because the author has a bunch of letters after his name. For every clunker, there are gems.
And you New York Times reviewers who wrinkle your nose at true crime are simply not widely read enough to appreciate the genre's full gamut and ought not discuss as an expert a subject you haven't mastered.
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