CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

True Crime Author Curt Gentry, 1931-2014, R.I.P.

The co-author of the true crime phenomenon Helter Skelter has passed. Curt Gentry [Wiki], who penned the book with Vincent Bugliosi, died of apparent natural causes at the age of 83 in mid-July.

The book is the favorite of many a fan of the genre. Some have admitted on CLEWS to devouring this very long book in as little as three days. It was Gentry's engrossing narrative drive (he was an experienced journalist) that made it such a page-turner. Helter Skelter easily made its way onto my own Top 10 list and holds up to the scrutiny of time as an oustanding example of the form.

For more:

New York Times obituary (the Times is actually rather polite to the genre in this piece! albeit short.)

LA Times obituary

The Christian Science Monitor's Top 5 Historical True Crime Books and more links

Randy Dotinga of the Christian Science Monitor considered his most very favorite historical true crime titles ever and came up with this list of the top five: 

1. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

2. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder That Shocked Chicago by Simon Baatz

3. Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides

4. Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz

5. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

Now there's a solid list. Larson's is the book that introduced many of my generation to historical true crime. I did have a hiccup at a couple of them, though. I reviewed #4 for The Hatchet and Lizzie herself would've been proud of the hatchet job I gave it. And although the author of #5 made me mad,  a lot of true crime devotees and professional reviewers loved the book.

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'A murder mystery from 178 years ago' - CNN picked up the story of two brothers who took their grandfather's old ghost stories seriously ---- and discovered a mass grave in Pennsylvania.

 http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/24/pennsylvania.graves.mystery/

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Timesfreude - If schadenfreude means taking pleasure in the pain of others, then I am all a-freude with my other fellow Times haters at the very latest Manhattan flapdoodle. Here's a set of links from Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/  if you too enjoy nurturing a New York grudge.

Can you get DNA from bullshit?

It's a clever business strategy, I'll give them that.

 

It goes like this:

 

One, in your dungeon laboratory, develop a way to fabricate forensic samples of DNA from a particular person -- a way to create a "fake" sample.

 

Two, write a paper that explains precisely how anyone with a chemistry background can fake a DNA sample and publish it on the internet.

 

Three, call into question the fundamental reliability of every DNA sample ever taken into evidence anywhere, because, after all, you've now proven they can theoretically be faked.

 

Four, form a corporation to develop a patented method of detecting faked DNA evidence.

 

Five, market your sorry-not-free "authentication assay" to every law enforcement agency on earth as "necessary for maintaining the high credibility of DNA evidence in the judiciary system." Ideally, land a feature in the New York Times.

 

Alas, all this has already happened. The company is called Nucleix.

 

It is immoral, unethical, and offensive to me that these men have done this. But they have. One small group of misguided souls has actually managed to think up a way to undermine the best method of forensic science ever discovered. 

 

They managed to craft whole new arguments for defense attorneys (and the occasional stupid prosecutor) to try on unsophisticated jurors. Already the ACLU is yapping about it.

 

I hope this fake DNA boondoggle is not taken seriously and gets no more media attention than it already has. I also hope others will call them out on this.  

 

That Andrew Pollack and the New York Times helped to promote this obscenity with no apparent regard for the ethics of doing so was in and of itself offensive to me and only confirms my low opinion of that publication, f/k/a a newspaper, as in this piece the Times again proves itself a corporate tool.

 

If this company (meaning Nucleix, not the Times) had an ounce of integrity, the cure it is marketing for the disease it invented would be as readily available on the internet as the instructions for "faking" DNA results.

The Times Strikes Again

The latest true crime author to be unnecessarily excoriated in the pages of the New York Times in a grandiloquent review is Dave Cullen. He can take comfort in the fact that he joins an exclusive club: Ann Rule, Vincent Bugliosi, and many other authors in our favorite genre have been derided in its pages. 

It appears that book critic Janet Maslin read both new Columbine books, as she mentions the second book out now by Jeff Kass. It's hard to tell how the two books compare, so the review offers zero guidance to those who want to choose between them. The Associated Press reviewer did a better job in that regard. I am left to wonder if the Times reviewer read both books and decided to write about the one she liked the least. Maybe it's more fun to write nasty reviews?

I am hard-pressed to find a positive review of a true crime book in the New York Times archives -- at least in the last decade. The exception to the rule: Harold Schechter managed to garner three praise-filled reviews in the Times for The Devil's Gentleman. They were well earned reviews, to be sure (I loved the book), though none were penned by Ms. Maslin, who has repeatedly stated that she sees no value in true crime subjects -- and mystifies me by reading and reviewing a "tabloid" genre she obviously loves to hate.

If you've seen any other favorable reviews of a true crime book in the Times since 2000, I'd love to read them. And I keep browsing the paper often, hoping a flattering review of a true crime title might one day again appear there. Will Ms. Maslin ever read a true crime book and like it? I don't think it's a realistic expectation. If Rush Limbaugh joined the Peace Corps, I'd be less surprised.

With my own first book coming out in a month, I hope my publisher will not send a copy to the Times and have asked it not to do so. I have no reason to think the Times would pluck my tome from the heaping pile of submissions but dread the thought that it might not skip a chance to unfavorably compare an umpteenth author to Truman Capote.

The Times man is 'no Ann Rule'

Oh my but I got a chuckle at the expense of a newspaper today.

So a journalist from the New York Times penned a true crime paperback, a spousal murder story.

Said a reviewer in the Library Journal: "The narrative is good but could have been fleshed out quite a bit more; [the author] doesn’t provide an in-depth portrayal of either perpetrator, leaving the reader unsure of the real motive for the crime.... The author is talented but should read his Ann Rule before attempting another true-crime book."

Oh, my, my. Which publication is it whose reviews of Ann Rule drip with condescension and complaints about Ann Rule's "hellish details," hmm??

Links in the theme

Harry Potter Lingers More people are reading these days, and You Know Who gets much of the credit.

Witness Spots Murderer on TV Crime Show Ron Tyler was watching a new episode of 48 Hours when Clarence Bailey came on the screen. Tyler is certain that he recognized the man who, sixteen years ago, shot and killed his mother. The Dallas Morning News has details on a case that suddenly isn't so cold. I am reminded of Joseph Foy, who recognized Coral Watts on TV years after seeing him commit a murder.

A Shocking Ruling An appellate  judge in Texas issued a ruling so extreme and extraordinary that it may cost her that seat she holds on the bench. And I hope she does get fired as an example to the rest of our judiciary.

As the Times is reporting today, in a rape/murder case, Judge Sharon Keller of Texas refused to grant postconviction relief to a man even after DNA testing revealed that he was not the source of semen on the victim. As the judge has remarked, finality is more important than claims of actual innocence. No matter how credible the claim of actual innocence is.

What nonsense. It's shocking! It's utterly appalling! Where does public confidence in our criminal jusice system factor into her curious algebra?? Even President Bush - President George W. Bush! - pardoned the man whose semen didn't match.

I say GOOD RIDDANCE to any judge who opines that "finality" is more important than demonstrable innocence. Unfortunately, I am noticing more and more of these "DNA non-match" cases, and it makes me furious.

Of course, we can count on the Times to write an article 1/10 of the length it deserves and to give the piece an idiotic headline: Mixed Opinions of a Judge Accused of Misconduct.

Norman Mailer's Troubles with the Times

The true crime genre can claim Norman Mailer as one of its monarchs, for he wrote the seminal Executioner's Song, which won the Pulitzer Prize and made all American true crime fans so very proud (for we are, in the words of Edward Hale Bierstadt, "as patriotic in our thirst for blood as we are in everything else").

But Norman Mailer had to battle critics his entire career, and among his fiercest was -- you guessed it, and "further amazement is futile," as Bierstadt would say -- The New York Times.

So I was delighted to discover a letter written by Norman Mailer and addressed to one Arthur Sulzberger taking issue with the Times, calling their reviews sloppy, slovenly, ugly, and all sorts of other adjectives that leave me atwitter. So let it be said that any true crime author who gets an ugly review in the Times is privileged to join a fraternity with many distinguished members.

The haters in the Times

Many people who enjoy bloody murder mysteries turn up their noses at the genuine article. Unfortunately, the most influential haters publish their work in the Times. 

The New York Times is the worst. Wrote the critic I will not deign to name in a piece that appeared in that puffed-up publication:  "One thing you don't read true crime for is the truth." Thankfully her true-crime reviews are infrequent; otherwise I'd probably have to take blood pressure medication.

Now it seems some of the haters are even true crime authors themselves.  Astonishing me to no end, noteworthy true crime author Kate Summerscale gave her own genre a tongue-lashing in the London Times today.

Remarks the prize-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher:

True crime is a sleazy, uneasy genre. Accounts of murder, in newspapers and in books, seem to prey on suffering and to play to their readers' darkest fantasies.

After that provocative, self-loathing remark, she goes on to discuss her own book in some detail.

Frankly, I was astonished by the success of her book. Another look at Constance Kent? {Oh, s**t, I've given away the ending to the clueless, haven't I?} And here I assumed that the case had already been, em, pardon, but, done to death already.  Silly me. Summerscale has cleverly reintroduced an apparently forgotten case to readers on several continents by presenting it as a mystery and the case itself as some sort of watershed.

In her Times essay today, the author even goes so far as to claim that the first book about the "Road Hill murder," which (she says) was The Great Crime of 1860, "was perhaps the first book-length account of any single murder."

Well, now, I feel much better. The author who hates her genre doesn't have any clew what she is talking about. Book-length examinations of individual murder cases came long, long before 1860. 

I think of Eugene Aram, the schoolteacher convicted of murder in 1759, who inspired many books in the centuries that have passed since then. The Life and Trial of Eugene Aram is one that leaps to mind at once; it came out in 1832, perhaps as a reprint at that, and wasn't the first book on said depraved intellectual. I want to insert something tart here about modern examples of depraved intellectuals, but I'll leave it alone.

The Times is nice, x 2 - wow

The New York Times is once again in my good graces, since it just published a nice review of an historic true crime title - not once, but twice.

The first author bestowed with this rare honor was Paula Uruburu for her book American Eve [Amazon; B&N]. The Times's summer reading edition slathered praise all over the book while quibbling a bit with prose considered occasionally too "purple." That's the Times for you, impossible to fully satisfy.

The review also contains some quite irritating and gratuitous spoilers, so don't read it if you don't know the ending of the Thaw-White-Nesbit case and want to enjoy some suspense. And let's not be surprised that it's a New York story the paper so favors, since on those occasions when the Times  does deign to publish a flattering review of a true crime book, eight times in ten it's set in New York. Though I do think, from everything I've seen, that the book deserved it.

All quibbles aside, the author ought to be as happy as a butcher's dog with that review.

The second book the Times liked is Kathryn Harrison's While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family [Amazon; B&N]. I've been looking forward to this book for the better part of a year.

The author is well-known memoir writer Kathryn Harrison; the publisher is Random House, which actually called the book "true crime-ish." Like the Times, Random House rarely connects its moniker to a true crime story, which is probably not coincidental. "True crime-ish" is perhaps the closest Random House likes to come to our favorite genre.

While They Slept concerns 18-year-old Billy Gilley and the murders of his parents and sister in 1984 in Medford, Oregon and the survival of another sister. Remarked the Times: "Her telling brings moral clarity to the dark fate of a family: the daylight gaze of narrative itself as a form of empathy." The reviewer is a poet; the review shows this.

But I can't help but wonder what the Times's resident book-butcher Janet Maslin would have said. Every author who reads the Times prays that his or her book lands on someone else's desk. Congratulations to these two authors for well-deserved turns of literary fate.

Overused word? I'll give you a &*^#@)^& overused word

On the New York Times blog "Paper Cuts" appears a fun piece by Bob Harris called Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing - his list of overused adjectives that regularly appear in book reviews because the English language only has so many permutations of "great" or "lousy".

But there's a word missing from the overused list. It too often appears in reviews the Times deigns to publish in our favorite genre. If you have ever found yourself wondering what became of Lizzie Borden's hatchet, I suspect it's on the desk of the non-fiction editor of the New York Times Book Review. As regular as a vegetarian, the Times can be counted on to denigrate true crime as TABLOID.

Storming Las Vegas by John Huddy - "tabloid".

Entering Hades by John Leake - "tabloid".

Everything ever written by Vincent Bugliosi - "tabloid".

Everything ever written by Ann Rule - "tabloid".

Unless, of course, the author is from New York. Those reviews rely on a special, superlatives-only dictionary and two more overused words said comparatively - Truman Capote.  For all its literary pretentions, when it comes to books, the Times is a local rag.

On a brighter note, my local tabloid caught wind of the tabloid book I am writing. I told my comrades down at the township hall about my obsession-cum-tabloid hardcover, and they told the South Lyon Herald. Those folks were nice enough to write up a little ditty about it. I swear, if the Times ever did put its dirty tabloid mitts on my book, it wouldn't be with my consent, and rather than read any review they'd deign to publish on this Detroiter's true crime book, I'd save myself some time and just drop a frying pan on my foot.