If there were a literary award for genre outliers, I might nominate Murder at Teal's Pond [Amazon Goodreads B&N] for the Barely True Crime Award because it manages to flout so many genre conventions in one short book.
The premise is an interesting one. The television phenomenon Twin Peaks had as its central question, who killed Laura Palmer? There was a real-life Laura Palmer whose murder inspired the show. The murder victim's name was Hazel Drew.
The TV show Twin Peaks was inspired by a 1908 case in which a pretty, young, single woman from Sand Lake, New York was found in a pond, murdered. The case was never solved. Not even close. It was apparently never really investigated, because there weren't many clews. The official records are long gone. Utterly undaunted, authors David Bushman and Mark T. Givens offer a case history. The book does begin with a fascinating introduction in which Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost explains how a case he heard about from his grandmother's gossip "lodged in a corner of my mind". Years later, that mysterious local woman found floating dead in a pond would become 'Laura Palmer', the mysterious murder victim (also inspired by the noir film Laura), the main character in Twin Peaks.
If only Mark Frost had written the entire book....
After the introduction, the book about Hazel Drew's case takes a strange turn. The authors begin with a list of characters, Dramatis Personae. Am I supposed to read this? It's full of spoilers! It feels like homework.
They then launch into the story by describing their research process and some false trails. This is a test of the reader's patience.
These authors then steal fiction techniques, narrating a portion of the story from the victim's point of view, which is very rare in the true crime genre, but they soon abandon this Capote-esque device and get about the story, thereafter manufacturing extensive passages of dialogue among secondary characters, once again rarely seen in the true crime genre.
What follows are 250 pages of names -- of everyone ever mentioned in the matter. Detectives, family, friends of the victim, every witness with any remote connection, the men in her life. The list is dizzying. At one point, this remarkable sentence appears: "After the detectives had talked to the Hoffays and followed up with the Rollmans and Gundrum, Powers returned to Troy, leaving Ulmer behind in the country." Got that?
These authors promise early on that they have solved the unsolved mystery. The authors state, "We do... believe we've uncovered the murderer, and we make a pretty strong case for the prosecution. The solution is explosive. Read on to find out who - and why." But they didn't. And that is a literary true crime. Promising readers a strong and explosive solution to an unsolved murder, and then failing to deliver, is a misdemeanor assault upon the intelligence of the reader.
Claiming that your book is "a brilliantly researched reinvestigation" when it has no footnotes and its only sources are newspapers and books on local history is another insult.
Moreover, it seemed to me while reading this story that the case of Hazel Drew is not very mysterious. She was probably a prostitute, although that did not occur to these authors.
But the clews were there.
She was last seen alive walking down a country road at night (and why do poor single women do this?). Various witnesses saw her walking on Taborton Road (a busy road, then). Her family seemed secretive and indifferent to her fate... She knew half the men in town... all those men denied knowing her... she was often seen hanging around the train station.... she was strangled.
And yet these authors conclude that the murder of Hazel Drew is "a cautionary tale about the dangers of walking through the foreboding woods of Taborton on dark summer nights." That is almost poetic, when in truth, the murder of Hazel Drew is a cautionary tale about the dangers of walking through the foreboding woods of prostitution. This book might have been more interesting if it had stated the obvious, or delved into why the fictional version of Hazel Drew was cleaned up for television.
In real life, Hazel Drew was the daughter of an unemployed alcoholic layabout. On TV, Laura Palmer was the daughter of a prominent attorney.
I might go on, but there is a pile of books at my elbow that promises more conventional true crime fare. I agree with the Kirkus review that this book is best left to fans of Twin Peaks. It was obviously not written for true crime fans, who can barely stomach it.
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