E.L.P., R.I.P.

Seventy years ago today, on August 8, 1937, the United States lost the best true crime writer it ever produced when Edmund Lester Pearson passed away. That's a large statement, but I'd wager that all those qualified to make such judgments would cosign it. He was hugely popular during his lifetime, and only Scotch lawyer William Roughead ever inspired anything close to the same sense of awe in his followers.

He was lionized more than even the very best of his crime-writing contemporaries. Few of those others are known today even in the most esoteric true crime circles. Miss F. Tennyson Jesse, Alexander Woolcott, Henry Irving, Filson Young, J.B. Atlay, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, Andrew Lang, and Harold Eaton all produced great true crime stories, but none quite had Pearson's flair, and to my knowledge, none are in print now. Pearson is.

(Photo via Lizzie Andrew Borden.com)

Pearson was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1880, attended Harvard, lived in Scarsdale, New York and spent a career as a librarian at the New York Public Library. His essays appeared in magazines such as Scribner's and Vanity Fair (where Dominick Dunne now holds his chair).

Pearson exploded onto the crime scene with his seminal Studies in Murder in 1924. Many other anthologies followed, including More Studies in Murder, Five Murders, Murders that Baffled the Experts, Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders, and Instigation of the Devil. It took me more than a decade to track down a copy of the last and rarest one because, Alas and Alack!, he temporarily went out of print the year he died.

Decades passed before he was rediscovered by the Lizzie Borden set. Pearson's most famous essay, The Borden Case, was attacked in 1961 by author Edward D. Radin, who thought that New Bedford's plump heroine was innocent. Radin came out with his contrarian, goofy Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story that year, but Radin's tepid rebuttal to Pearson had the positive effect of reviving interest in the neglected genius.

And what is it, exactly, that made him so special? For one, he provided the best brief explanation ever given for the natural curiosity about murder - a simple justification for the genre called true crime. "What chiefly makes crime worth reading about," Pearson said, "either as fiction or fact, is the human element, the strange problems it presents in human conduct, the revelations it makes of the dark recesses of the human heart."

He was fussy about the crimes he selected. He was in love with murderesses and relished instances of womankind on trial. He wouldn't write about a case unless the murderer and murderee knew each other well; this eliminated from his consideration serial killers, assassins, and routine robberies gone awry. Said he --

Persons who find much interest in an assassination by a gangster or gunman ought to know that these events are feeble in their charm compared to a murder, if one could be unearthed, by an archbishop. And a thoroughly good poisoning perpetrated by the Professor of Christian Ethics in a respectable school of divinity; a well-planned shooting or bludgeoning by a fashionable curate; or almost any sort of homicide by the Dean of a cathedral would be more precious to the discriminating amateur than all the vulgar atrocities which may be committed in the underworld of Memphis, Tenn., in the next eighteen months.

Puckish, urbane, waspish, sometimes W.A.S.P.ish, Pearson brought out the most curious and hilarious moments of criminal history. As contemporary true crime author Keven McQueen recently remarked to me, "he is the person who showed me how true crime writing does not have to be tawdry or exploitive and indeed can be an art."

My favorite passage (for obvious reasons if you know me) is this gem from How Does A Murderer Look? (which calls to mind some of the silliness being touted right now about genes that purportedly predispose people to violent acts) --

Some of the famous criminal lawyers, men who have spent their lives in restoring the burglar to his friends and his relations, and saving murderers from punishment, are fond of going about the country preaching that man is a machine, and that the criminal simply cannot help committing crime.

Not one of these gentlemen has explained why the criminal is so much more successful in resisting criminal impulses in Windsor, Ontario (for example), than directly across the river in Detroit.

"The glands which cause crime" (joyfully believed in by those who take their scientific information from the Sunday supplements) hardly seem to be present in the human body, when that body happens to dwell under the Canadian or the British law! "The glands which cause crime" become mysteriously active in direct proportion to the ease with which the criminal law is cheated in the country where the owner of those glands is living.

His are rich books, fudge cake with fudge frosting, best appreciated a tiny bite at a time. Those of a mind to discover him might begin with Masterpieces of Murder: An Edmund Pearson True Crime Reader, a collection of his essays edited by Gerald Gross, first published in 1963. Just don't castigate me if you become addicted and drain your savings to collect them all.